Pedro Cunha Neves

Growing global migration flows highlight the importance of understanding their economic impact. While many studies have explored how immigration affects host countries’ macroeconomic indicators, the results are mixed. In this work, we develop a meta-analysis to investigate the effect of immigration on the economic performance of the host country, focusing on key indicators such as economic growth, productivity, unemployment, and innovation. The results indicate that, on average, immigration has a positive and statistically significant impact on economic performance. The effect varies based on immigrant and host country characteristics, including qualifications, age, and economic development level. Additionally, differences in methodological approaches across studies contribute to the observed heterogeneity in findings. These findings underscore the importance of further research on the economic effects of immigration and offer implications for both policy and future research.

The impacts of the unconventional monetary policy measures adopted by central banks after the 2007 financial crisis have been the focus of an increasing number of empirical studies. While some studies have focused on the impacts on the domestic economy, others have examined the international spillover effects of the policies adopted by the major central banks. The latter studies have, however, reported heterogeneous results. In this paper, we develop a meta-analysis of the empirical literature that examines the spillover effects of unconventional monetary policy on international capital flows. We find that, while the global average effect is not statistically different from zero, there are specific effects that vary significantly according to the development level of the destination country, the nature of the capital flow, the Central Bank that adopts the UMP, and the type and year of implementation of the UMP measure.

We develop a meta‐analysis of the empirical literature that estimates the impact of international trade on income convergence between countries. We find that, on average, trade tends to generate inter‐country income convergence. Especially in more recent years, we identified a preference for publishing and citing studies that report a stronger effect of trade on convergence. We also find that the effect of trade on income convergence is sensitive to the characteristics of the countries included in the sample, data structure, and estimation techniques.

This paper studies the simultaneous effects of relocation of production (as part of globalization) and institutions on intra- and inter-country wage inequality. Firstly, empirical evidence shows that labor unions act at decreasing inequality, but this shrinking effect tends to be mitigated by globalization. Theoretically, we study the conditions under which this empirical evidence is verified. Unskilled labor-intensive relocations together with (de)unionization processes of the labor force contributed to the increasing path of intra-country wage inequality observed in some of the leading countries. However, most recently, skilled relocations may help to decrease intra-country inequality in leading countries (e.g., the US), but to increase it in follower countries (e.g., China).

For most of the past half-century, a significant number of companies have carried out a process of transformation of production chains by offshoring parts, components, or services to other countries. The integration of most economies into global value chains (GVCs) has triggered important impacts on several dimensions of the labour markets. In view of the divergent results reported by the related literature, we conduct a meta-analysis on the effects of GVCs on employment. We find that although the average impact is not statistically different from zero, the impact of GVCs on employment differs significantly according to the countries’ development level, the degree of workers’ qualifications, the types of sectors that are considered, the unit of analysis, and the indicators used to measure GVCs and employment.

Youth unemployment rates are significantly and consistently higher than total unemployment rates, hitting especially high values in a crisis context. The aim of this work is to assess the determinants of youth unemployment in developed countries, relying on a youth to total unemployment ratio. Using data from 18 OECD countries from 1990 to 2019, the results of the estimations indicate that labor market flexibilization and economic growth have a widening effect of on the gap between youth and total unemployment rates, while post-secondary educational attainment contributes to reduce the gap.