Immigration has been a steady force acting on population and employment within countries throughout human history. Focusing on the last four decades, we show that the mix of immigrants to rich ...countries has been, overall, rather balanced between college and non-college educated. The growth of immigration has been driven by immigrants from nonrich countries. The economic impact of immigration on receiving economies needs to be understood by analyzing the specific skills brought by immigrants. The complementarity and substitutability between immigrants and natives in employment, and the response of receiving economies in terms of specialization and technological choices, are important when considering the general equilibrium effects of immigration. In the United States, a balanced composition of immigrants between college and noncollege educated, together with the adjustment of demand and technology, imply that general equilibrium effects on relative and absolute wages have been small.
In this paper we analyze the long-run impact of immigration on employment, productivity, and its skill bias. We use the existence of immigrant communities across U.S. states before 1960 and the ...distance from the Mexican border as instruments for immigration flows. We find no evidence that immigrants crowded out employment. At the same time, we find that immigration had a strong, positive association with total factor productivity and a negative association with the high skill bias of production technologies. The results are consistent with the idea that immigrants promoted efficient task specialization, thus increasing TFP, and also promoted the adoption of unskilled-efficient technologies.
Using longitudinal data on the universe of workers in Denmark during the period 1991–2008, we track the labor market outcomes of low-skilled natives in response to an exogenous inflow of low-skilled ...immigrants. We innovate on previous identification strategies by considering immigrants distributed across municipalities by a refugee dispersal policy in place between 1986 and 1998. We find that an increase in the supply of refugee-country immigrants pushed less educated native workers (especially the young and low-tenured ones) to pursue less manual-intensive occupations. As a result immigration had positive effects on native unskilled wages, employment, and occupational mobility.
Large inflows of less educated immigrants may reduce wages paid to comparably-educated, native-born workers. However, if less educated foreign- and native-born workers specialize in different ...production tasks, because of different abilities, immigration will cause natives to reallocate their task supply, thereby reducing downward wage pressure. Using occupational task-intensity data from the O*NET dataset and individual US census data, we demonstrate that foreign-born workers specialize in occupations intensive in manual-physical labor skills while natives pursue jobs more intensive in communication-language tasks. This mechanism can explain why economic analyses find only modest wage consequences of immigration for less educated native-born workers.
In this study, we use cross‐country bilateral data to quantify a two‐step process of international migration and its aggregate determinants. We first analyze which country‐specific factors affect the ...probability that individuals join the pool of potential (aspiring) migrants. Then, we consider the bilateral and destination country factors that affect the frequency at which potential migrants turn into actual migrants. Using information on potential migrants from World Gallup surveys and on actual migrants from national censuses for 138 origin countries and 30 major destinations between 2000 and 2010, we analyze economic, policy, cultural, and network determinants of each step. We find that the size of the network of previous migrants and the average income per person at destination are crucial determinants of the size of the pool of potential migrants. Economic growth in the destination country, on the other hand, is the main economic generator of migration opportunities for a given pool of potential migrants. We also find that college‐educated exhibit greater actual emigration rates mainly because of better chances in realizing their immigration potentials, rather than because of higher willingness to migrate.
In this paper we analyze the impact of immigrants on the type and quantity of native jobs. We use data on 15 Western European countries during the 1996–2010 period. We find that immigrants, by taking ...manual-routine type of occupations pushed natives towards more "complex" (abstract and communication) jobs. This job upgrade was associated to a 0.7% increase in native wages for a doubling of the immigrants' share. These results are robust to the use of an IV strategy based on past settlement of immigrants across European countries. The job upgrade slowed but did not come to a halt during the Great Recession. We also document the labor market flows behind it: the complexity of jobs offered to new native hires was higher relative to the complexity of lost jobs. Finally, we find evidence that such reallocation was larger in countries with more flexible labor laws.
Immigration, offshoring, and American jobs Ottaviano, Gianmarco I. P; Peri, Giovanni; Wright, Greg C
The American economic review,
08/2013, Letnik:
103, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Following Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) we present a model in which tasks of varying complexity are matched to workers of varying skill in order to develop and test predictions regarding the ...effects of immigration and offshoring on US native-born workers. We find that immigrant and native-born workers do not compete much due to the fact that they tend to perform tasks at opposite ends of the task complexity spectrum, with offshore workers performing the tasks in the middle. An effect of offshoring and a positive effect of immigration on native-born employment suggest that immigration and offshoring improve industry efficiency. (JEL J24, J41, J61, L24) PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Within the migration–trade nexus literature, this paper proposes a more carefully defined measure of migration business networks and quantifies its impact on bilateral trade. Using cross‐sectional ...data and controlling for the overall bilateral stock of migrants, the share of migrants employed in managerial/business‐related occupations has a strong additional effect on trade. Those immigrants should be the ones directly involved in the diffusion and transmission of information relevant for companies trading with other countries. Their presence is found to increase the volume of trade, especially of imports, beyond the already known effect of immigrants or highly educated immigrants. When we control for the presence of highly educated immigrants, the share of immigrants in business network occupations shows a particularly large effect on trade in differentiated goods. We also find that highly educated individuals in business‐related occupations are those contributing to stimulate import and export by the largest margin. Business network effects seem particularly important in stimulating exports to culturally different countries, such as those with different language and legal origin.
The H-1B visa program allows companies to hire skilled foreign workers. Before 2014, the vast majority of these visas were allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. Since then, the program has ...been severely oversubscribed and all cap-subject visas have been allocated through lotteries. The authors merged Compustat data with administrative firm-level data on the universe of approved petitions for H-1B visas. Using difference-in-differences and matching estimators, this article finds that the switch in the visa allocation system negatively affected the growth of companies that used the H-1B program. Results indicate that these effects are quantitatively large and that their magnitudes grow over time.
Climate change, especially the warming trend experienced in recent years by several countries, could affect agricultural productivity. As a consequence the income of rural populations will change, ...and with it the incentives for people to remain in rural areas. Using data from 115 countries between 1960 and 2000, we analyze the effect of differential warming trends across countries on the probability of either migrating out of the country or from rural to urban areas. We find that higher temperatures in middle-income economies increased migration rates to urban areas and to other countries. In poor countries, higher temperatures reduced the probability of migration to cities and to other countries, consistently with the presence of severe liquidity constraints. In middle-income countries, migration represents an important margin of adjustment to global warming, potentially contributing to structural change and even increasing income per worker. Such a mechanism, however, does not seem to work in poor economies.
•In low income countries a temperature increase decreases migration and traps people into poverty.•In middle income countries warming strengthens the incentives to migrate to cities or abroad.•Higher temperatures encourage a transformation towards more urban and productive economies.•Growing temperatures mainly increase emigration towards close and non-OECD destinations.
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