Impact of Low-Skilled Immigration on Female Labour Supply

In this paper, segmenting the market by educational levels, we investigate which native-born women are more affected by an increase of low-skilled immigrants working in the household service sector. We present a model of individual choice with home production and, using a harmonized dataset (the Cross-National Equivalent File), we estimate its main comparative static results. The results suggest that the share of immigrants working in services is positively associated with an increase of native-born women’s labour supply at the intensive margin, if skilled, and at the extensive margin, if unskilled. Moreover, the results show that these effects are larger in countries with less-supportive family policies