Andreas Beerli

Publications

• The abolition of immigration restrictions and the performance of firms and workers: Evidence from Switzerland
• American Economic Review, 2021, 111(3), 976 – 1012, joint with Jan Ruffner, Michael Siegenthaler, and Giovanni Peri.
• Video summary, twitter summary English/ German, NZZ June 2020, ungated working paper, slides, replication files.
• Abstract We study a reform that granted European cross-border workers free access to the Swiss labor market. Our Differences-in-Differences estimations leverage the fact that regions close to the border were affected more intensely and earlier. In these regions, the employment share of foreign workers grew 10 percentage points in the decade following the reform. We find that the greater availability of cross-border workers increased wages and possibly employment of highly educated native workers although many of the new cross-border workers were also highly educated. These results are the consequence of a simultaneous increase in labor demand: free cross-border mobility increased the size, productivity, and innovation performance of some incumbent firms, attracted new firms, and created opportunities for natives to pursue managerial jobs. Most of these effects are larger in skill-intensive sectors and in firms that experienced skill shortages before the reform. Our results highlight that understanding the labor market effects of immigration requires analyzing the impact on workers and firms jointly.
• featured in: NZZ 2022.07, Blick 2020.09 (german), Luzerner Zeitung 2020.09 (german), Tagesanzeiger 2020.08 (german), NZZ 2020.08 (german), Tagesanzeiger 2017.04, VoxEU 2015, Corriere del Ticino 2015 (italian), Le Temps July 2015, May 2016 (french), Swiss Radio 2015 (german).

The supply of foreign talent: How skill-biased technology drives the location choice and skills of new immigrants
• Journal of Population Economics, forthcoming, joint with Ronald Indergand and Johannes Kunz. Working Paper.
• Abstract An important goal of immigration policy is to facilitate the entry of foreign-born workers whose skills are in short supply in national labor markets. In recent decades, information and communication technology [ICT] has fueled the demand for highly educated workers at the expense of lower educated groups. Exploiting the fact that different regions in Switzerland have been differentially exposed to ICT due to their pre-ICT industrial composition, we present evidence suggesting that more exposed regions experienced stronger ICT adoption, accompanied by considerably stronger growth in relative employment and wage-premia for college-educated workers. Following this change in the landscape of relative economic opportunities, we find robust evidence that these regions experienced a much stronger influx of highly educated immigrants in absolute terms as well as relative to lower educated groups. Our results suggest that immigrants’ location decisions respond strongly to these long-run, technology-driven changes in their economic opportunities.
• featured in: IMPACT Monash Business School Feb 2022, Smart Company May 2022, Media Briefing Royal Economic Society 2015, UBS Center Summary, Swiss Radio (german), Die Volkswirtschaft (May 2015: german/french, Nov 2015: german/french), Tagesanzeiger (german), BAZ Dec 2015.

• Demand forces of technical change: Evidence from the chinese manufacturing industry
• China Economic Review, 2020, 60, 101157, joint with Franziska Weiss, Fabrizio Zilibotti, and Josef Zweimüller. Ungated working paper
• Abstract This paper investigates the effect of domestic market size on innovation activities across different durable good industries in the Chinese manufacturing sector. We ad- dress the endogeneity of market size by an IV strategy, based on a measure of potential market size, which is driven only by changes in the Chinese income distribution. This measure is exogenous to changes in prices and qualities of durable goods and is a valid instrument for expected future market size. Our results indicate that an increase in market size by one percent leads to an increase in firm-specific total factor productivity by 0.46 percent and an increase in labor productivity by 0.50 percent. These findings are robust to controlling for export behavior of firms and supply side drivers of R&D.

Ongoing projects

• The Labor Market Effects of Restricting Refugees' Employment Opportunities
• joint with Achim Ahrens, Dominik Hangartner, Selina Kurer, and Michael Siegenthaler. IZA Discussion Paper No. 15901.
• Abstract Do policies that restrict employment opportunities help to explain why refugees typically have lower employment rates and wages than similar native citizens? This paper analyzes the effects of policies regulating whether, where, and for whom refugees are allowed to work. The empirical design exploits the exogenous assignment of refugees to Swiss cantons upon arrival and the rich spatio-temporal variation in cantonal labor market policies. Using newly collected data on cantonal policies 1999–2016 and high-quality linked administrative data, we find negative employment and earnings effects of banning refugees from working in the first months after arrival, of prioritizing residents over refugees, and of restricting labor markets geographically and sectorally. Moving from the least to the most restrictive policy mix reduces the average employment rate of refugees in the first five years after arrival from 23% to 16%. Likely by exogenously reducing workers’ outside options, region and sector restrictions also lower refugees’ job mobility and hourly wages. Consistent with a monopsonistic explanation, the restrictions partly explain why refugees earn less in similar jobs than observationally equivalent resident workers. We find no evidence that restrictive policies spur emigration. This facilitates the identification of longer-term scars of the policies: we find that priority to residents and a long work ban in the initial year reduce refugees’ earnings in the following four to five years. Together, these results suggest that labor restrictions burden both refugees and host communities with significant costs.
• featured in: Blick am Sonntag May 2023.

• Political repercussions of open borders
• joint with Ala' Alrababa'h, Dominik Hangartner, and Dalston Ward. Draft available at request.
• Abstract Prominent explanations of anti-immigrant attitudes give centrality to the socio-cultural differences between immigrants and host communities and to the economic threats posed by newcomers. In this paper, we provide evidence of a backlash to immigration in a context where both socio-cultural and economic threats were minimal. We study Switzerland, which opened its borders and labor market to the rest of Europe in the 2000s. Using a difference- in-differences approach, we first show that the number immigrants living and working in Swiss border municipalities increased dramatically after the borders opened, with the vast majority of these immigrants coming from neighbouring France, Germany and Italy. In the same border municipalities, we find that support for the anti-immigrant parties increased by approximately five percentage points after borders were opened. These findings contribute to our theoretical understanding of anti-immigrant sentiment and have important implications for the political consequences of the European Union’s principle of free movement.

• The right to be heard: a randomized controlled trial on economizing procedural justice
• joint with Lorenz Biberstein, Martin Killias, Michel Maréchal, and Nora Markwalder. Slides available at request.
• Abstract The right to be heard – Audi Alteram Partem – is a fundamental principle underlying most legal systems and constitutes a basic human right. Legal scholars argue that the right to be heard is essential for the rule of law because it helps achieving truth and legitimizes judicial sentencing. On the other hand, hearings are labor and time intensive, leading to an overloaded criminal justice system, particularly for mass crimes. We evaluate the importance of hearings in the context of a large-scale reform of the Swiss Criminal Procedure Code, which delegated sentencing power from courts to the prosecutors through the means of penal orders. As a consequence of the reform, prosecutors sentence offenders by sending them a penal order that is solely based on police reports in roughly 90% of all criminal proceedings, de facto removing the defendants‘ right of being heard. We conducted a field experiment in collaboration with a public prosecution office in Switzerland and randomly invited defendants to participate in a prosecutorial hearing, allowing us to investigate the causal effect of hearings on prosecutorial sentencing, perceptions of procedural fairness, and recidivism.

I’m passionate about finding synergies and collaborating with NGOs, public and private sector organizations and research institutions to advance our understanding of human behavior allowing us to design, test, improve and scale social programs, policies and interventions that ultimately allow people and communities to thrive. Here are some organizations I have been working with:

Blogs / policy briefs