La Follette Lecturer Walter Steingress will present for the Seminar Series.
About Walter Steingress
Walter Steingress joined the La Follette School in August 2024. Before joining La Follette, he served as a Principal Researcher in the International Department at the Bank of Canada, where he provided timely analysis of global economic conditions as well as advice on international policy issues. His research interest lies in international economics, with a particular emphasis on international migration and trade. Prior to his tenure at the Bank of Canada, Walter was a Research Economist at the Bank of France. He has been a visiting and adjunct faculty member at Paris School of Economics, Syracuse University and the University of Rochester. In 2019, the Canadian Economic Association awarded him the Robert Mundell Prize. Walter earned his PhD from the University of Montreal and holds a master’s degree from Boston University.
About the paper
This paper studies the causal impact of immigration on local public finances and provision of public goods in the U.S. We uncover substantial heterogeneity across immigrants with different skills, due to their asymmetric impact on the per capita tax base: Absent full insurance through intergovernmental transfers, there is a relative decline in per capita revenues and expenditures with the arrival of low-skilled immigrants, and an increase with high-skilled immigrants. While the two types of immigrants offset each other on average, spatial differences in the share of low- and high-skilled immigrants lead to unequal fiscal effects across U.S. counties; the impacts differ for second-generation immigrants and across public services, with no effect on education. Our results hold using the network shift-share instrument as well as the leave-out push-pull ancestry instrument and are not driven by changes in attitudes towards redistribution with the arrival of immigrants.
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Organizer
La Follette School of Public Affairs,
Contact
Héctor Pifarré i Arolas, hparolas@lafollette.wisc.edu
