SERM: Socioeconomic Effects of Return Migration: Evidence from a large shock

SERM project aims at identifying and quantifying the short and the long-term effects of return migration using state of the art methods in Economics and Machine Learning. We rely on a large, unexpected, and unique historical shock, analysed with detailed micro-level census, administrative data, and digitized sources, to shed light on a series of socioeconomic outcomes and margins of behaviour among natives and return migrants. In 1974, following a military coup that put an end to Western Europe's longest dictatorship and to a Colonial War that lasted more than a decade, Portugal recognized the right to self-determination of its former African colonies. The civil wars that soon erupted in these territories induced close to half a million ethnic Portuguese living in Africa to return to a country that had, at the time, little more than 9 million inhabitants.

Whereas repatriates were forced to return, their location in the Portuguese territory may be driven by observed and unobserved factors. We will employ several econometric techniques to deal with these concerns, examining the magnitude of the increased pressure on public finance as well as the efficacy of Government policies aimed at absorbing the population shock. These policies included securing housing for the repatriates and providing welfare payments. More specifically, we will exploit the municipal fraction of repatriates to understand the political and economic effects of the shock. In addition, we will identify if and how cultural and social attitudes (including gender norms) change as result of such large population movements. Finally, we will take advantage of the recent advances in text analysis approaches to extract data from digitized newspapers on the evolution of sentiments of both repatriates and natives.

SERM will contribute to draw lessons on how to develop government policy and manage the immigration process in other settings.