Margarita Rohr

The impact of immigration of foreign trade of cultural goods in Italy

The main objective of this research is to analyse the effect of the foreign trade of cultural goods in Italy and design on immigration decisions. The trade of cultural goods, by affecting individual preferences, reduces the cost of any migration move and favours outflows towards exporting and importing countries. A gravity model for Italy and its 58 trade partners will be established and estimated for the period 2010-2021. The cultural goods are defined using the UNESCO classification (2009), including cultural heritage, performance, visual arts, books, audio-visual material. The issue of identification and endogeneity will be addressed through the inclusion of a comprehensive set of fixed effects and by instrumenting cultural exports and imports with past flows and an imputed share of cultural exports and imports.  It is expected to find a positive relationship across different classifications for cultural goods, areas of destination and alternative econometric techniques.