Steven Stillman

The Long-Term Impacts of International Migration

Steven Stillman and his collaborators John Gibson, David McKenzie and Halahingano Rohorua have examined the long-term impacts of international migration by comparing immigrants who had successful ballot entries in a migration lottery program, and first moved almost a decade ago, with people who had unsuccessful entries into those same ballots. The long-term gain in income is found to be similar in magnitude to the gain in the first year, despite migrants upgrading their education and changing their locations and occupations. This results in large sustained benefits to their immediate family, who have substantially higher consumption, durable asset ownership, savings and dietary diversity. In contrast they found no measurable impact on extended family.

Steven Stillman’s research focuses on empirical labor economics, specializing in the behavior of individuals and households, and the interplay between government policy and human behavior. He has done extensive work examining the impact of migration on immigrants and their families exploiting a lottery used to allocate migrant quota slots. In recent work, he has also examined voting behavior along a number of dimensions and how individuals have responded to changes in a number of policies, including minimum wages, the drinking age and doctor’s fees.

During his visit at CESifo, he will work on a project examining the impact that different economic and social shocks had on the development and growth of “New Zealand First,” one of the older populist parties in the OECD.

Steven Stillman is a Professor of Economics at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of Washington in 2000. Prior to moving to Italy in 2016, he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Otago, a Senior Fellow at Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, a Senior Research Economist at the New Zealand Department of Labour and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the RAND Corporation. He is an affiliated researcher at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM), Motu Economic and Public Policy Research and the Melbourne Institute.