On the Fiscal Impacts of Immigration

This work consists of two parts dealing with specific public finance effects of immigration, one empirical and one theoretical. The first part analyses the fiscal impact of immigrants in Austria within the method of generational accounting, which allows to take into account projected demographic scenarios for both natives and immigrants. Since the latter inherently have different lifetime patterns of residence and supposedly have different earnings and benefit recipiency patterns, they will generally make an important difference to public budgets. In the second part, a political economy model is used to determine the impact of immigrant voting on the outcome of a (direct) tax vote, and therefore the level of redistribution. Thus, both the actual participation of immigrants in fiscal redistribution in a host country as well as their possible political influence on the level of such redistribution are dealt with.

Autorentext
The Author: Karin Mayr was born in Wels (Austria) in 1976. She studied economics at the University of Linz from 1994 to 2000. Since 2001, she is assistant professor at the department of economics at the University of Linz. From 2002 to 2003, she spent eight months at the University of Warwick (England) as a Marie Curie Visiting Fellow. The author was awarded her doctorate in economics in 2004.

Inhalt

Contents: Public finance effects of immigration - Fiscal impact of immigrants in Austria - Immigrant voting and the outcome of a (direct) tax vote.