An Unusual Effect of Irish Migration - Viral Riverdancing

A sign of the times I suppose. Dozens of people breaking into river-dancing at an Australian train station (viewed 230,000 or so times since yesterday). I really hope this becomes a wider phenomenon. So wide that eventually a bailout renegotiation is agreed just to stop it spreading.

Fact of the day

Working on a paper on migration and health. Most interesting statistic of the day (from OECD 2009) is that 3 per cent of the world's population live outside of the country they were born in, or about 190 million people.

CReAM Working Paper on Effects of Migration on Blood Pressure and Hypertension

Interesting working paper, following on from a recent JHE paper that looked at the effect on mental health.

CReAM Discussion Paper No 24/10

Natural Experiment Evidence on the Effect of Migration on Blood Pressure and Hypertension

John Gibson*, Steven Stillman**, David McKenzie† and Halahingano Rohorua‡

* University of Waikato and Motu Economic and Public Policy Research ** Motu, University of Waikato, IZA and CreAM † Development Research Group, World Bank, IZA and CreAM ‡ University of Waikato

Non-Technical Abstract

Over 200 million people live outside their country of birth and experience large gains in material well-being by moving to where wages are higher. But the effect of this migration on health is less clear and existing evidence is ambiguous because of the potential for self- selection bias. In this paper, we use a natural experiment, comparing successful and unsuccessful applicants to a migration lottery to experimentally estimate the impact of migration on measured blood pressure and hypertension. Hypertension is a leading global health problem, as well as being an important health measure that responds quickly to migration. We use various econometric estimators to form bounds on the treatment effects since there appears to be selective non-compliance in the natural experiment. Even with these bounds the results suggest significant and persistent increases in blood pressure and hypertension, which have implications for future health budgets given the recent worldwide increases in immigration.

Keywords: Bloodpressure,Hypertension,Lottery,Migration,Naturalexperiment. JEL Classification: C21, I12, J61.