By Simone Moriconi and Thomas Baudin

The objective of the “Migration And Labor supplY wheN culturE matterS” (MALYNES) project is to propose an encompassing framework suited to predict the future effects of migration on labor supply in the European Union. MALYNES pursues this general objective following a three-fold strategy. First, it wants to create knowledge about future scenarios regarding labor mobility and migration in Europe. These scenarios depend on natives’ perceptions of the value of immigration, and political support towards an open migration policy. Second, it applies well-known empirical approaches from the cultural economics literature to the detailed information available from European time use and register data. In this way, it derives a cross-cultural “map” of the most important values and preferences (many of them related to family behaviors) that affect the individual labor supply decision. Third, it develops a quantitative theory for the impact of migration on labor supply. The model incorporates cultural differences as a key ingredient of behaviors like fertility, marriage and time use of both migrant and native families in a wide variety of European countries. We estimate the parameters of the model using structural estimation techniques.