Marco Tabellini is a Post-Doctoral Fellow of business administration in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit, where he will become assistant professor in July 2019. Marco studies the economic and political effects of migration, both internal and international. His research interests are centered around political economy, labor economics, economic history, and international trade.
Marco received his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018. He also holds a BSc and a Master of Science in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University.
In this paper, I show that political opposition to immigration can arise even when immigrants bring economic prosperity. I exploit exogenous variation in European immigration to U.S. cities between 1910 and 1930 induced by World War I and the Immigration Acts of the 1920s, and instrument immigrants’ location decision relying on pre-existing settlement patterns. I find that immigration triggered hostile political reactions, such as the election of more conservative legislators, higher support for anti-immigration legislation, and lower public goods provision. Exploring the causes of natives’ backlash, I document that immigration increased natives’ employment and occupational standing and fostered industrial production and capital utilization. Even in occupations highly exposed to immigrants’ competition, there were no employment or wage losses among natives, suggesting that political discontent was unlikely to have economic roots. Consistent with this interpretation, I provide evidence that natives’ backlash was increasing in the cultural differences between immigrants and natives. These results indicate that diversity might be economically beneficial but politically hard to manage.
Can emigration from less democratic and economically less developed areas induce political and economic change? We study this question in the context of the second Great Migration of African Americans (1940–1970), when more than 4 million blacks left the U.S. South and moved to the urban North. To deal with the endogeneity of black emigration, we construct a “reversed” shift-share instrument which predicts black outflows by interacting pre-determined shares of blacks born in southern counties and living in the North with observed migration flows into northern areas. Using this empirical strategy and relying on a variety of datasets assembled and digitized from historical archives, we find that black emigration reduced support for segregationist candidates in Presidential and in Democratic primary elections, and increased the share of county resources devoted to black schools. Our interpretation is that black emigration was economically costly for the white elites who reacted by making political concessions to limit the outflow of African Americans. Consistent with the idea that black departures increased labor costs in agriculture, we find that the Great Migration reduced the prevalence of tenancy and lead to farm consolidation. We conclude by documenting that the effects of black emigration on mechanization and on farm value were highly heterogeneous, and depended crucially on initial farm size.
Boustan, Leah, and Marco Tabellini. "Black Out-Migration and Southern Political Realignment." Working Paper, 2018. (Preliminary Draft Available Upon Request.)
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How does the appearance of a new out-group affect the economic, social, and cultural integration of previous outsiders? We study this question in the context of the first Great Migration (1915–1930), when 1.5 million African Americans moved from the U.S. South to urban centers in the North, where 30 million Europeans had arrived since 1850. We test the hypothesis that black inflows led to the establishment of a binary black-white racial classification and facilitated the incorporation of—previously racially ambiguous—European immigrants into the white majority. We exploit variation induced by the interaction between 1900 settlements of southern-born blacks in northern cities and state-level outmigration from the U.S. South after 1910. Black arrivals increased both the effort exerted by immigrants to assimilate and their eventual Americanization. These average effects mask substantial heterogeneity: while initially less integrated groups (i.e., Southern and Eastern Europeans) exerted more assimilation effort, assimilation success was larger for those that were culturally closer to native whites (i.e., Western and Northern Europeans). These patterns are consistent with a framework in which changing perceptions of out-group distance among native whites lower the barriers to the assimilation of white immigrants.
Is racial heterogeneity responsible for the distressed financial conditions of US central cities and for their limited ability to provide even basic public goods? If so, why? I study these questions in the context of the first wave of the Great Migration (1915-1930), when more than 1.5 million African Americans moved from the South to the North of the United States. Black inflows and the induced white outflows ("white flight") are both instrumented for using, respectively, pre-migration settlements and their interaction with MSA geographic characteristics that affect the cost of moving to the suburbs. I find that black in-migration imposed a strong, negative fiscal externality on receiving places by lowering property values and, mechanically, reducing tax revenues. Unable or unwilling to raise tax rates, cities cut public spending, especially in education, to meet a tighter budget constraint. While the fall in tax revenues was partly offset by higher debt, this strategy may, in the long run, have proven unsustainable, contributing to the financially distressed conditions of several US central cities today.
In this paper, we study the effects of immigration on natives’ marriage, fertility, and family formation across U.S. cities between 1910 and 1930. Instrumenting immigrants’ location decision by interacting national changes in migration flows across ethnic groups with pre-existing immigrants’ enclaves across U.S. cities, we find that immigration raised marriage rates and the probability of having children for young native men and women. We show that these effects were driven by the large and positive impact of immigration on native men’s employment and occupational standing, which increased the supply of “marriageable men.” We explore alternative mechanisms—changes in sex ratios, natives’ cultural responses, and displacement effects of immigrants on female employment—and provide evidence that none of them can account for a quantitatively relevant fraction of our results.
Carlana, Michela, and Marco Tabellini. "Happily Ever After: Immigration, Natives' Marriage and Fertility." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-004, July 2018. (Revised March 2019. Winner of European Economic Association Young Economist Award, 2018. IZA (Institute of Labor Economics) Discussion Paper Series, No. 11467, April 2018)
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We study whether economic integration fosters the process of democratization and the channels through which this might happen. Our analysis is based on a large panel dataset of countries between 1950 and 2014. We instrument actual trade with predicted trade constructed by estimating a time-varying gravity equation similar to Feyrer (2009). We find that economic integration has a positive effect on democracy, driven by trade with democratic partners and is stronger for countries with lower initial levels of economic and institutional development. These results are consistent with a learning/cultural exchange process whereby economic integration promotes the spread of democracy from more to less democratic countries. We corroborate this interpretation by providing evidence against alternative mechanisms, such as income effects, human capital accumulation, and trade-induced changes in inequality.
We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in European immigration to US cities between 1910 and 1930 induced by World War I and the US Immigration Acts to study if the inflow of immigrants triggered natives’ backlash. Using local newspapers data, we document that immigration fueled anti-immigrant sentiments and increased the frequency of racially charged words against the foreign born (e.g. “Inferior Races”; “Beaten Races”; etc.). Racist reactions were entirely driven by Catholic and Jewish (but not by Protestant) immigration, suggesting that natives’ backlash had cultural, rather than economic, foundations. Consistent with this interpretation, we do not find any evidence of heterogeneity in newspapers’ rhetoric depending on city economic characteristics. Our findings further indicate that European immigration generated “contagious animosity” towards other minority groups - in particular African Americans and Chinese immigrants already living in US cities. Finally, we complement our analysis by using Congressional speeches from the Senate, and applying supervised machine learning methods. In line with newspapers’ reactions, Senators representing states that received more immigrants during the previous decade were significantly more likely to adopt a racist rhetoric when discussing immigration-related bills. One possible interpretation of our findings – though not the only one – is that politicians responded to changes in demands from their constituencies, and switched to a racist rhetoric following their voters’ sentiments.
D'Amico, Leonardo, and Marco Tabellini. "Immigration and Cultural Backlash in the Age of Mass Migration: Evidence from Local Newspapers and Congressional Speeches." Working Paper, 2018. (Draft Coming Soon!)
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Nicola Fontana, Marco Manacorda, Gianluca Russo and Marco Tabellini
Citation:
Fontana, Nicola, Marco Manacorda, Gianluca Russo, and Marco Tabellini. "Emigration and Long-Run Economic Development: the Effects of the Italian Mass Migration." Working Paper, September 2018.
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Fouka, Vasiliki, Kai Gehring, and Marco Tabellini. "The Effect of Absolute and Relative Group Size on Immigrant Integration." Working Paper, 2018.
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How are boundaries of in-groups and out-groups in a society formed, and how do they evolve? Does the appearance of a new out-group foster or hinder the incorporation of previously excluded groups? We address these issues in the context of immigration to the US between 1965 and 2010, and study how new immigrants from China and Mexico affected native whites’ attitudes towards blacks and their social integration. Using an instrumental variables strategy that leverages exogenous variation in the arrival of immigrants to different states combined with survey and census data, we find that immigration reduces whites’ prejudice toward African Americans, and raises black-white intermarriage rates. These effects are driven by Mexican – but not by Chinese – immigrants, consistent with a mechanism in which the arrival of a more socially distant group narrows the distance between the majority and existing minorities. Our study provides an under-appreciated glimpse into the evolution of social status in multi-ethnic societies
Fouka, Vasiliki, Shom Mazumder, and Marco Tabellini. "Changing In-group Boundaries: The Role of New Immigrant Waves in the U.S." Working Paper, 2019.
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Fouka, Vasiliki, and Marco Tabellini. "The Great Migration and Political Change: Racial Realignment in the U.S. North, 1940-1970." Working Paper, 2019.
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