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Essays on Social Welfare Systems, Education and Agglomeration across the EU
Anastassova, Lubomira ; Jurajda, Štěpán (vedoucí práce) ; Kézdi, Gábor (oponent) ; Fidrmuc, Jarko (oponent)
The thesis focuses on three topics of interest: the difference between native and immigrant welfare receipts, returns to education due to educational mismatch between natives and the foreign-born employees, and the effects of agglomeration on earnings. The first chapter of the dissertation examines the difference in social income between natives and immigrants across a number of EU countries and the US, based on the generosity of the existing welfare systems. The findings confirm the existence of large social income gaps in favour of non - EU immigrants, and these gaps are mainly due to the fact that immigrants' families have more children, fewer earners and are more likely to have non-wage income than the natives. The second chapter compares the difference in returns to education between foreign-born and native workers in France, Germany, and Austria. Using an educational matching approach, the results show that immigrants have lower wage returns in being over-educated than natives but are penalized less for being under- educated. The third chapter focuses on the distribution of earnings across the UK from a spatial perspective, which is determined by the endogenous relationship between productivity and agglomeration or employment density. While the agglomeration effects are similar across...
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