Kastis, Ioannis;
(2025)
Essays on Immigration and Technological Change.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis consists of three chapters on immigration and technological change. Chapter 1 examines the impact of immigration on inequality in host countries. It evaluates the effect on wage inequality through two channels: the earnings distribution of natives and the composition of the wage-earning population. Both effects are found to be small. Wage inequality is further decomposed into inequality within the immigrant and native group and inequality between the two groups. Inequality among immigrants is consistently higher. Chapter 2 analyses the longer-term effects of immigration on native wages. It demonstrates that while immigrants downgrade upon arrival, they rapidly upgrade through skill acquisition to realize their earnings potential. Such movement leads competition effects of immigration to ripple through the native wage distribution. As many migrations are temporary, while immigration causes a positive labour supply shock, subsequent out-migration leads to negative supply shocks. The chapter introduces a dynamic labour market model and studies the competition effects of immigration along with immigrant upgrading and out-migration. Chapter 3 explores how production organization within firms determines their ability to adopt new technologies. It examines an exogenous shift in organization in the English tailoring industry of the late 19th century, prompted by the arrival of Jewish immigrant tailors who fled Russian pogroms. Jewish tailors arrived when production was bespoke, and native tailors used sewing machines - the new technology - to increase individual productivity. In Russia, where machines were unavailable, Jewish tailors produced ready-to-wear garments with a greater division of labour. Upon arriving in England, they combined the available machines with the division of labour to scale up ready-to-wear production. Combining original data on production tasks with firm-level data, the chapter shows that Russian arrivals compelled native tailors to adopt this organizational practice, accelerating machine adoption and the transition to mass production.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Essays on Immigration and Technological Change |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Economics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10218768 |
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