Marco Tabellini is an assistant professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy unit.
Professor Tabellini studies the political and the economic effects of immigration. His research also seeks to understand which factors facilitate or hinder immigrant assimilation, how the presence of different ethnic groups in a society influences inter-group relations, and to what extent migration can be a tool to foster the political and the social integration of under-represented segments of the population. To answer these questions, Marco has focused on the early twentieth century US, which was characterized by the massive inflow of Europeans and by the first migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North of the US. More recently, Marco has also analyzed the effects of the second Great Migration of African Americans between 1940 and 1970, investigating how this episode contributed to the development of the Civil Rights movement, both in the South and in the North of the United States.
Professor Tabellini earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018, and spent the academic year 2018-2019 as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Business School before joining the faculty. He also holds a B.S. and M.S. in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University.
In this paper, I jointly investigate the political and the economic effects of immigration and study the causes of anti-immigrant sentiments. 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 as well as 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 redistribution. Exploring the causes of natives’ backlash, I document that immigration increased natives’ employment, spurred industrial production, and did not generate losses even among natives working in highly exposed sectors. These findings suggest that opposition to immigration was unlikely to have economic roots. Instead, I provide evidence that natives’ political discontent was increasing in the cultural differences between immigrants and natives. Results in this paper indicate that, even when diversity is economically beneficial, it may nonetheless be socially hard to manage.
Between 1940 and 1970, during the second Great Migration, more than four million African Americans moved from the South to the North of the United States. In this period, blacks were often excluded from the political process in the South but were eligible to vote in the North. We study if, by changing the composition and the preferences of the northern electorate, the Great Migration increased demand for racial equality and induced legislators to more actively promote civil rights legislation. We predict black inflows by interacting historical settlements of southern born blacks across northern counties with the differential rate of black emigration from different southern states after 1940. We find that black in-migration increased the Democratic vote share and encouraged grass-roots activism. In turn, Congress members representing areas more exposed to black inflows became increasingly supportive of civil rights. They were not only more likely to vote in favor of pro-civil rights bills, but also more willing to take direct actions, such as signing discharge petitions, to promote racial equality. Investigating the mechanisms, we document that both “between” and “within” party changes contributed to the shift in the position of northern legislators on civil rights. Taken together, our findings suggest that the Great Migration played an important role in the development and success of the civil rights movement.
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 immigrant group affect the integration of earlier generations of migrants? 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 northern urban centers, where 30 million Europeans had arrived since 1850. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation induced by the interaction between 1,900 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 culturally closer to native whites (i.e., Western and Northern Europeans). Labor market outcomes do not display similar heterogeneity, suggesting that these patterns cannot be entirely explained by economic forces. Our findings are instead more consistent with a framework in which changing perceptions of outgroup distance among native whites lowered the barriers to the assimilation of white immigrants.
Between 1915 and 1930, during the First Great Migration, more than 1.5 million African Americans migrated from the South to the North of the United States, altering the racial profile of several northern cities for the first time in American history. I exploit this episode to study how an increase in racial heterogeneity affects the provision of public goods and city finances. I predict black in-migration by interacting 1900 settlements of southern born blacks across northern cities with variation in outmigration from the South after 1910. I find that black inflows had a strong, negative impact on both public spending and tax revenues in northern cities. The decline in tax revenues was not due to cities’ decision to cut tax rates, but was entirely driven by a reduction in property values. These findings suggest that the housing market response to black arrivals imposed a negative fiscal externality to receiving cities that, unable or unwilling to raise taxes, were forced to cut spending. Consistent with this interpretation, cities did not change the allocation of spending across categories, while the negative effects of black in-migration were smaller when controlling for the (predicted) white outflows triggered by black arrivals.
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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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.
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." September 2018.
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