This dissertation aims to shed some light on the impact that changes in the socioeconomic environment can have on poor and marginalised ethnic minorities in developed countries. In chapter 1, I review the literature on the relation between the environment and the socioeconomic inclusion of immigrants and minority groups and provide an overview of the situation of the Roma in Europe and Spain. I hypothesise about how studying the integration of the Roma in Europe could help in gaining some insight into the study of the integration of minorities. I present my research project in Chapter 2 and a summary of some of the field work studies I conducted prior to starting the design of my research project in the Appendix. In chapters 3 and 4, I present the two papers I have written based on this research. In Chapter 3, I estimate the impact on children of a radical change in their socioeconomic environment, from marginalized slum settlements to normalized housing. I test the hypothesis that a child that is resettled from the slum at an early age will have better education and life outcomes than a child that is exposed to slum life in his childhood. I exploit the variation in “exposure to slum life” of Spanish Roma children aged 7 to 14 whose families were resettled from slum settlements to flats in a major European city (Madrid) over the span of 10 years. I make use of family fixed effects equations to correct for any potential family unobservables that could bias my results. I find that being resettled from the slum before age 6 has a positive and significant impact on the probability that a child aged 7 to 14 will not have repeated grade at school. I find no significant impact of the program on children’s integration and aspiration outcomes. In Chapter 4, I evaluate the impact of moving out of the slums for selected labour outcomes of Spanish Roma families resettled at different points in time into integrated flats in the Region of Madrid. I find that moving away from the slums and into integrated flats is positively correlated with a higher integration into the labour market of both male and female adults heads of household, as measured by the probability of having worked in a skilled job (apprenticeship) and in the formal economy and not having received the minimum income subsidy. The main reason why I cannot interpret these relations causally is the potential self-selection of families into the years in which they were resettled by the program, which would generate an omitted variable bias problem. I provide bounds to my estimates following Krauth (2011) to argue that this omitted variable bias could be very small and it could still be possible that leaving the slum earlier has a positive impact on the families.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:678723 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Santiago, Lualhati |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/76027/ |
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