Immigration and productivity: a Spanish tale

© 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York. This paper analyses the extent to which changes in labour composition may affect variation in productivity in Spain. With an original and novel database, we track recently recorded changes in productivity to investigate how the entry of immigrants into the domestic labour market affects productivity. In a few specific situations, our results show that immigrants play the role of environment builders, who bring expertise necessary to fostering productivity and encouraging further improvements in productivity.