The pro-export effect of subnational migration networks: new evidence from Spanish provinces

The paper investigates the effect that subnational networks of immigrants and emigrants had on exports from Spanish provinces (NUTS3) over the period of 2007-2016 by integrating state-of-the-art advances in the gravity model literature. In particular, it allows for heterogeneity in provincial export capacity, which significantly reduces pro-export effects, and select the Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood as the most suitable estimator according to diagnostic tests. When both immigration and emigration are instrumented, the pro-export effect of immigrants found by previous studies vanishes and that of emigrants, instead, appears appreciable. The results obtained suggest that over the period that encompasses the double-deep crisis, immigrants did not show significant information and enforcement effects in the considered context, while the effects of emigrant demand for home-country goods may have been important. The prevalence of emigrant over immigrant effects appears attributable to a change in the composition of the migration stocks over the considered period of crisis.