THE WAGE IMPACT OF THE MARIELITOS BORJAS, GEORGE J.
Industrial & labor relations review,
10/2017, Letnik:
70, Številka:
5
Journal Article
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This article brings a new perspective to the analysis of the wage effects of the Mariel boatlift crisis, in which an estimated 125,000 Cuban refugees migrated to Florida between April and October, ...1980. The author revisits the question of wage impacts from such a supply shock, drawing on the cumulative insights of research on the economic impact of immigration. That literature shows that the wage impact must be measured by carefully matching the skills of the immigrants with those of the incumbent workforce. Given that at least 60% of the Marielitos were high school dropouts, this article specifically examines the wage impact for this low-skill group. This analysis overturns the prior finding that the Mariel boatlift did not affect Miami’s wage structure. The wage of high school dropouts in Miami dropped dramatically, by 10 to 30%, suggesting an elasticity of wages with respect to the number of workers between −0.5 and −1.5.
This essay revisits the argument that the removal of worldwide immigration restrictions would induce a very large increase in world GDP The recent books Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World by ...Paul Collier and The Price of Rights: Regulating International Labor Migration by Martin Ruhs raise a number of questions about the underlying economic model. The essay shows how these concerns can greatly attenuate the predicted gains.
Heaven’s door Borjas, George J; Borjas, George J
1999., 20111128, 2011, 1999, 1999-00-00, 1999-01-01
eBook, Book
The U.S. took in more than a million immigrants per year in the late 1990s, more than at any other time in history. For humanitarian and many other reasons, this may be good news. But as George ...Borjas shows in Heaven's Door, it's decidedly mixed news for the American economy--and positively bad news for the country's poorest citizens. Widely regarded as the country's leading immigration economist, Borjas presents the most comprehensive, accessible, and up-to-date account yet of the economic impact of recent immigration on America. He reveals that the benefits of immigration have been greatly exaggerated and that, if we allow immigration to continue unabated and unmodified, we are supporting an astonishing transfer of wealth from the poorest people in the country, who are disproportionately minorities, to the richest.
Immigration is not evenly balanced across groups of workers who have the same education but differ in their work experience, and the nature of the supply imbalance changes over time. This paper ...develops a new approach for estimating the labor market impact of immigration by exploiting this variation in supply shifts across education-experience groups. I assume that similarly educated workers with different levels of experience participate in a national labor market and are not perfect substitutes. The analysis indicates that immigration lowers the wage of competing workers: a 10 percent increase in supply reduces wages by 3 to 4 percent.
The continuing inflow of hundreds of thousands of refugees into many European countries has ignited much political controversy and raised questions that require a fuller understanding of the ...determinants and consequences of refugee supply shocks. This paper revisits four historical refugee shocks to document their labour market impact. Specifically, we examine: The influx of Marielitos into Miami in 1980; the influx of French repatriates and Algerian nationals into France at the end of the Algerian Independence War in 1962; the influx of Jewish émigrés into Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s; and the exodus of refugees from the former Yugoslavia during the long series of Balkan wars between 1991 and 2001. We use a common empirical approach, derived from factor demand theory, and publicly available data to measure the impact of these shocks. Despite the differences in the political forces that motivated the various flows, and in economic conditions across receiving countries, the evidence reveals a common thread that confirms key insights of the canonical model of a competitive labour market: Exogenous supply shocks adversely affect the labour market opportunities of competing natives in the receiving countries, and often have a favorable impact on complementary workers. In short, refugee flows can have large distributional consequences.
This paper presents a theoretical and empirical study of how immigration influences the joint determination of the wage structure and internal migration behavior for native-born workers in local ...labor markets. Using data from the 1960–2000 decennial censuses, the study shows that immigration is associated with lower in-migration rates, higher out-migration rates, and a decline in the growth rate of the native workforce. The native migration response attenuates the measured impact of immigration on wages in a local labor market by 40 to 60 percent, depending on whether the labor market is defined at the state or metropolitan area level.
It has been difficult to open up the black box of knowledge production. We use unique international data on the publications, citations, and affiliations of mathematicians to examine the impact of a ...large, post-1992 influx of Soviet mathematicians on the productivity of their U.S. counterparts. We find a negative productivity effect on those mathematicians whose research overlapped with that of the Soviets. We also document an increased mobility rate (to lower quality institutions and out of active publishing) and a reduced likelihood of producing "home run" papers. Although the total product of the preexisting American mathematicians shrank, the Soviet contribution to American mathematics filled in the gap. However, there is no evidence that the Soviets greatly increased the size of the "mathematics pie." Finally, we find that there are significant international differences in the productivity effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and these international differences can be explained by both differences in the size of the émigré flow into the various countries and in how connected each country is to the global market for mathematical publications.
In response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, New York City closed all nonessential businesses and restricted the out-of-home activities of residents as of March 22, 2020. This ...order affected different neighborhoods differently, as stores and workplaces are not randomly distributed across the city, and different populations may have responded differently to the out-of-home restrictions. This study examines how the business closures and activity restrictions affected COVID-19 testing results. An evaluation of whether such actions slowed the spread of the pandemic is a crucial step in designing effective public health policies.
Daily data on the fraction of COVID-19 tests yielding a positive result at the zip code level were analyzed in relation to the number of visits to local businesses (based on smartphone location) and the number of smartphones that stayed fixed at their home location. The regression model also included vectors of fixed effects for the day of the week, the calendar date, and the zip code of residence.
A large number of visits to local businesses increased the positivity rate of COVID-19 tests, while a large number of smartphones that stayed at home decreased it. A doubling in the relative number of visits increases the positivity rate by about 12.4 percentage points (95% CI, 5.3 to 19.6). A doubling in the relative number of stay-at-home devices lowered it by 2.0 percentage points (95% CI, -2.9 to -1.2). The business closures and out-of-home activity restrictions decreased the positivity rate, accounting for approximately 25% of the decline observed in April and May 2020.
Policy measures decreased the likelihood of positive results in COVID-19 tests. These specific policy tools may be successfully used when comparable health crises arise in the future.
This paper examines the evolution of immigrant earnings in the United States between 1970 and 2010. There are cohort effects not only in wage levels, with more recent cohorts having lower entry wages ...through 1990, but also in the rate of wage growth, with more recent cohorts experiencing less economic assimilation. The slowdown in assimilation is partly related to a concurrent decline in the rate at which the new immigrants add to their human capital stock, as measured by English language proficiency. The data also suggest that larger national origin groups experience less economic assimilation.
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