5.conclusions and outlook
This chapter has reviewed the economic assimilation of labor migrants, the evolution of bi-ethnic identities and the value and relevance if perceptions and attitudes, within the broader framework of the economic integration of immigrants. There is evidence that ‘soft’ factors like attitudes, perceptions and identities do affect economic behavior more than they are driven by them. However, most of these findings are still based on cross-sectional evidence and available only for few countries. We need to expand our analysis the available panel datasets of specific ethnic groups in different cultural setting. A major difficulty here that future research should try to tackle is to model the endogeneity of the processes of economic performance and social and cultural interactions.