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-vers