Negative Attitudes, Network and Education

We consider the impact of negative attitudes against immigrants and immigration on educational choice in a search and wage bargaining model including networking. We consider two cases in terms of the importance of negative attitudes againts immigrants for high and low educated individuals and find that more negative attitudes against immigrants has a positive impact on education in one case and a negative impact in the other and has no impact on natives. Immigration improves employment perspectives for immigrants and thereby increases immigrant education whereas endogenous negative attitudes lead to an ambiguous impact. Empirically, we consider immigrants’ high school attendance. On the macro-level, we confirm a signficant negative correlation between negative attitudes towards immigrants and high school attendance and a positive impact of networking on high school attendance. On the individual level, we use Danish register data to find a signficant positive correlation between negative attitudes towards immigrants and high school attendance and find a positive impact of networking on high school attendance. In both the macro and the micro-econometric analysis we run the same regressions for natives and find no significant impact of negative attitudes.