Measuring Fiscal Effects of Immigration In Europe: A quantile Approach

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the fiscal impact of immigration in Europe
using a quantile regression approach. These estimation methods provide a richer
characterization of the data, allowing us to consider the impact of a co-variate (which
one) on the entire distribution and not merely its conditional mean. Using data from
European Survey on Living Conditions (EU-SILC), we estimate the net fiscal position
of immigrants in Europe between 2007-2015. The net fiscal position is the difference
between social services obtained and personal taxes paid leading to be either a fiscal contributor
or a fiscal dependent. On average, the fiscal impact of both European and
non-European migrants is not different from that of native citizens. Surprisingly, when
using a quantile approach, we find that non-EU migrants belonging to the upper tail
of the distribution and to the lowest one, are much more contributors as compared
with the corresponding native citizens. At last, we find a very contrasting relationship
between the fiscal perception of European citizens regarding immigrants and the calculated
fiscal impact of immigrants: countries, where immigrants are perceived negatively,
are instead countries where migrants are net fiscal contributors and vice-versa