Identification and Estimation of the Economic Performance of Outmigrants using Panel Attrition

This paper presents conditions providing semiparametric identification of the conditional expectation of economic outcomes characterizing outmigrants using data on immigrant sample attrition. The approach does not require that individual immigrant departures be observed. Outcomes of interest are labor market earnings, labor force participation, and labor supply. We present a panel model which extracts the information on outmigrant performance from sample attrition and estimate it using German data. We find strong evidence of self-selection of outmigrants based on unobserved individual characteristics. Simulations are performed to quantify the gap in labor market earnings and labor force participation rates between immigrant stayers and outmigrants.