The Economics of Integration and Social Networks

Around 3.2 percent of the world’s population, some 216 million people, live outside their country of birth, making immigration an important economic and political issue in many countries across the world. Albrecht Glitz focuses his research on how immigration affects the receiving countries' labour markets.

Theory suggests a number of potential mechanisms. The most obvious and most carefully studied is through immigrants’ impact on wages and employment of the native workforce. However, there are other adjustment mechanisms that have only recently moved to the centre of attention: the adjustment through the output mix of the economy and the adjustment through endogenous changes in production technologies.

In two of his most important pieces of work, Mr Glitz has provided novel empirical evidence on all three of these channels, exploiting a variety of different data sets and institutional peculiarities in Germany.

More recently, and in part motivated by the empirical observation of substantial segregation of immigrant workers across firms, Mr Glitz has investigated the role of social networks in the labour market. Besides their potential effect on the clustering of particular types of workers in the same set of firms, informal networks may more generally – though certainly not exclusively – affect individual labour market outcomes through their capacity to transmit information, either between workers who inform each other about possible job opportunities, or between workers and employers by means of job referrals.

Much of his work on this topic has centred around estimating causal effects of social networks on labour market outcomes based on credible identification strategies, with the objective of gaining a better understanding of how networks actually operate and what functions they fulfil. His work initially focused on immigrant workers and networks based on ethnic similarity. Recently, he has included networks that were established as the result of joint employment spells at the same firm, so-called co-worker networks (in CESifo Working Paper 4250, "Coworker Networks in the Labour Market").

Albert Glitz obtained his PhD from University College London in February 2008, and started his academic work in the Department of Economics and Business of Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, where he became Associate Professor in 2013. He is a Research Fellow at both IZA and CReAM, the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration in London, and a research affiliate at CESifo in Munich. He is also an affiliated professor of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, where he teaches graduate courses in econometric methods and the economics of migration.