Independent Hazards, Local Interactions, and the Return Decision of Recent Migrants

AbstractConsider the duration of stay of migrants in a host country. We propose astatistical model of locally interdependent hazards in order to examine whetherinteractions at the level of the neighbourhood are present and lead to socialmultipliers. To this end, we propose and study a new two-stage estimationstrategy based on an inverted linear rank test statistic. Using a unique largeadministrative panel dataset for the population of recent labour immigrants tothe Netherlands, we quantify the local social multipliers in several factual andcounterfactual experiments, and demonstrate that these can be substantial.