Lidia Farré (UB, IAE-CSIC, IZA) 

New evidence on the healthy immigrant effect

Date: December, 15th. At 12,00h 

Room: 23.103 (Mercè Rodoreda Building).

Abstract  

This paper presents new evidence that immigrants have better health than natives upon arrival to their destination. It analyzes a very interesting episode in international migration, namely the exodus of Ecuadorians in the aftermath of the economic collapse in the late 1990s. More than 600,000 Ecuadorians from 1999 to 2005 left their homeland, most relocating in Spain. Using information from the birth certi…cate data, the paper compares the birth outcomes of immigrant women in Spain not only to that of natives at destination, but to that of natives in Ecuador and immigrants from other nationalities in Spain. These comparisons suggest that the better health at birth of children born to immigrants from Ecuador partly responds to the selection of healthier women into migration.

Lídia is a Visiting Professor at the Universitat de Barcelona and Research Affiliated at the Institut d'Anàlisi Econòmica (IAE-CSIC) in Barcelona since September 2014. She received her PhD from the European University Institute in 2006. After graduating from the EUI, she was assistant professor of economics at the University of Alicante, 2006-2009 and post-doc researcher at IAE-CSIC. Her main research interests are in Labor Economics and Applied Microeconometrics. She works on migration, gender and cultural economics, mainly from an empirical approach.