Health, immigration and settlement policies

Abstract: This thesis consists of five self-contained essays.Essay I investigates the effect of one individual's illness and death on the economic situation of a household. The empirical results suggest that people are well protected by the welfare system against earnings losses in times of illness, and that there is little impact of the patient's decreasing health on spousal labor supply. After the patient's death, however, it seems that surviving female spouses may experience drops in their living standard.In the late 1980s, the Swedish government introduced a refugee reception policy where it attempted to increase the geographic dispersion of immigrants by assigning people to an initial place of living. Essays II and III evaluate the impact of this policy on immigrants' labor market outcomes and internal migration in Sweden. The findings of Essay II indicate that the policy adversely affected long-term earnings, idleness and welfare dependency. The placement policy has also been criticized for increasing the number of relocations within Sweden; however, Essay III suggests that there is only weak evidence that the new system had an impact on secondary migration. Essay III also examines the determinants of individual relocation and location decisions. According to the results, refugee immigrants are attracted to large cities, people from the own country, and large overall immigrant populations. Overall and immigrant specific labor market characteristics also affect location decisions.The findings of Essay III indicate that the immigrant population tends to concentrate geographically; Essay IV investigates the impact this has on immigrant performance in the labor market. It uses the governmental placement policy as a source of exogenous variation, thus avoiding problems caused by sorting. The findings suggest that presence of people from the own country improves outcomes; furthermore, the results clearly demonstrate the importance of handling endogeneity problems when investigating these issues.Time spent in the host country is another potential influence on immigrants' earnings and employment; theory predicts that people assimilate in the labor market. Essay V considers how emigration of immigrants affects measures of labor market assimilation in Sweden. A large fraction of economic migrants leave Sweden shortly after arrival, whereas political migrants are more likely to stay. Within each group of immigrants, it is the less successful who emigrate, and consequently we find that measures of earnings assimilation that do not account for emigration overstate the true rate of assimilation.