Gianluca Orefice (Paris-Dauphine)
Giovanni Peri and Gianluca Santoni
Using employer-employee Italian data in the period 1998-2018 we analyze the impact of a regularization of undocumented immigrant workers in Italy on wage, employment and mobility outcomes of natives. Our empirical strategy takes advantage of the 2002 Bossi-Fini law that unexpectedly regularized 634,000 undocumented non-EU immigrants, with variation across firms and provinces that we use to identify a causal effect of the amnesty. We find that the policy had a small effect on the average wage of native workers and positive effects on employment at the local labor market level. Additionally, native co-workers in firms more affected by the policy were more likely to change employers in the post-policy period and such higher mobility resulted in a positive assortative reallocation to firms that slightly increased average wage and increased wage dispersion for natives.