Can immigrants insure against shocks as well as the native-born?

We examine the impact of job displacement and serious health problems on multiple measures of individual and household well-being using longitudinal data. We extend the previous literature by examining whether these shocks have differential effects for the native-born and immigrants and whether shock mitigation strategies and their effectiveness differ by immigration status. Our results suggest that both immigrants and native-born individuals have access to similar institutional and other formal and informal risk-sharing arrangements such that they are able to mitigate shocks against job loss or illness almost equally.     

Computerization and immigration: Theory and evidence from the United States

Recent technological changes have been characterized as “routine-substituting” because they reduce demand for routine tasks and increase demand for analytical and service tasks. Little is known about how these changes have impacted immigration, or task specialization between immigrants and native-born individuals. In this paper, we show that such technological progress has attracted immigrants who increasingly specialize in manual-service occupations. We also suggest that openness to immigration attenuated the job and wage polarization faced by native-born from technological changes. We explain these facts with a model of technological progress and endogenous immigration. Simulations show that unskilled immigration attenuates the drop in routine employment proceeding from technological change, enhances skill upgrading for native-born and raises economy-wide productivity and welfare.     

Immigration from poor to wealthy countries: experience of the United States

The U.S. experience with immigration from poor countries is examined using the results of two projects carried out by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Questions considered include what determines the supply of immigrants, how such immigrants fare in the U.S. job market, and how this immigration affects the prospects of native-born workers.     

A PATHWAY TO HOMEOWNERSHIP? EVIDENCE FROM THE IMMIGRATION REFORM AND CONTROL ACT OF 1986

The impact of legal status on economic outcomes has been well documented in the literature with most research focused on labor market outcomes such as wages and occupational mobility. In this paper, I utilize the exogenous variation created the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 to estimate the effect of amnesty polices on homeownership among undocumented immigrants. Using a regression discontinuity framework, the results suggest that the IRCA increased homeownership rates of eligible immigrants by around 4 percentage points relative to ineligible immigrants. Moreover, an extension to the main analysis suggests that immigrants ineligible for the IRCA adjusted their household formation by increasing the rates of coresidency. (JEL J61, R23, R31)     

Early labour-market experiences of second-generation immigrants in Sweden

This article investigates second generation immigrant's early labour-market performances in Sweden. To study their labour-market success we estimate dynamic transition rate models–Cox type proportional hazards, in a competing risk framework using register based panel-data set. Our results reveal that parental resources affect not only second-generation immigrants’ continuing education but also their later labour-market success. The study verifies that finding a job is difficult for second-generation immigrants and the significant unobserved-heterogeneity parameter estimate may indicate discrimination. As a whole, second-generation immigrants have worse labour-market performances compared to their native-born counterparts.     

The Earnings of Immigrant Men in Australia: Assimilation, Cohort Effects, and Macroeconomic Conditions

This paper analyzes the earnings of immigrant men in Australia using data from Income Distribution Surveys for 1982, 1986 and 1990. The paper expands on the standard approach used in the literature to evaluate immigrant earnings adjustment by considering the impact of current labour market conditions and conditions at labour market entry on current earnings. Immigrants from non-English speaking backgrounds have significantly lower earnings on arrival in Australia compared with native-born males, and this gap is not narrowed as years in Australia increase. However, poorer macroeconomic conditions at entry are found to have a significantly smaller negative effect on the earnings of immigrants from non-English speaking backgrounds than native-born males.     

Immigrants and the Use of Government Transfer Payments

This article examines the use of government benefits and allowances by Australian immigrants relative to their native-born counterparts. The study extends the Australian literature by employing micro-level (Australian Longitudinal Survey) data, controlling for a number of relevant variables including first or second generation immigrant status and the nature of transfer payments received. The data on young adults employed in the study provide a comparable population for examining the relative use of benefits among those of similar age, allowing comparisons based on only the relevant types of benefits. The results consistently reject the hypothesis that immigrants are disproportionately using benefit payments and thereby imposing a burden on public funds. These results are of interest, especially since Australia is already a major immigrant-receiving country, and since the Australian welfare system is more extensive in its coverage than most other immigrant-receiving countries.     

Labour segregation and immigrant and native-born wage distributions in Spain: an analysis using matched employer–employee data

This article carries out an empirical examination of the origin of the differences between immigrant and native-born wage structures in the Spanish labour market. Special attention is given in the analysis to the role played by occupational and workplace segregation of immigrants. Legal immigrants from developing countries exhibit lower mean wages and a more compressed wage structure than native-born workers. By contrast, immigrants from developed countries display higher mean wages and a more dispersed wage structure. The main empirical finding is that the disparities in the wage distributions for the native-born and both groups of immigrants are largely explained by their different observed characteristics, with a particularly important influence in this context of workplace and, specially, occupational segregation. Hipólito Simón, Esteban Sanromá and Raúl Ramos wish to thank the support received from the Ministerio de Fomento and the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia through the projects T 75/2006 (Plan Nacional de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación Científica), SEJ2004-05860/ECON and SEJ2005-04348/ECON, respectively. A previous version of this paper was published as an IVIE Working Paper (WP-EC 2007-03).     

Immigration and welfare magnets

"This paper investigates if the location choices made by immigrants when they arrive in the United States are influenced by the interstate dispersion in welfare benefits. Income-maximizing behavior implies that foreign-born welfare recipients unlike their native-born counterparts, may be clustered in the states that offer the highest benefits. The empirical analysis indicates that immigrant welfare recipients are indeed more heavily clustered in high-benefit states than the immigrants who do not receive welfare, or than natives. As a result, the welfare participation rate of immigrants is much more sensitive to changes in welfare benefits than that of natives."     

International students and labour market outcomes of US-born workers*

Do international students graduating from US colleges and universities affect labour market outcomes of similarly educated native-born workers? I address this question by exploiting a change in US visa policy that results in increases in the labour supply of master’s-level international students to the US labour market in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Estimates show that increases in their labour supply via temporary work permits in a certain field reduce employment of recently graduated native-born holders of a master’s degree but increase earnings of experienced native-born holders of a master’s degree in the same field. These findings support the hypothesis of substitution between skills of similarly educated immigrants and native-born individuals in the same age group and complementarity between skills of those in different age groups.     

Neighbourhood effects,preference heterogeneity and immigrant educational attainment

This paper investigates differences between the educational attainment of immigrants, children of immigrants and native-born individuals in Australia by using Australian Youth Survey (AYS) data combined with aggregate Australian Census data. Differences in educational attainment are decomposed into: (i) typical demographic and socio-economic sources common to all ethnic groups; (ii) unobserved region of residence and region of origin effects; and (iii) neighbourhood effects such as degree and ethnic concentration of particular ethnic groups in different neighbourhoods. A theoretical model incorporating these effects is proposed but structural estimation is not possible for lack of appropriate data. Instead, a reduced form methodology is proposed and employed. The empirical results identify positive ethnic neighbourhood effects in high school completion and university enrolment for some immigrant groups in Australia, in particular first and second generation immigrants from Asia. The results indicate that it is not just the size of the ethnic network but the ‘quality’ of the network that is important.     

Tenure Choice with Location Selection: The Case of Hispanic Neighborhoods in Chicago

A notable feature of immigration into the United States is the high degree of spatial concentration of different immigrant groups. This article asks the question whether residing in areas with a large proportion of a coethnic group influence the decision to own a home for Hispanics in the Chicago metropolitan area. The results show that Hispanics choose to live in Hispanic enclaves based on relatively homogeneous characteristics, such as recent migration, less English language fluency, and lower income. More years in the United States, higher education attainment, and English language fluency remain strong predictors of homeownership. Individuals are less likely to be homeowners in communities with a larger coethnic concentration, foreign-born residents, or lower-income families. (JEL C35 , J1 , R12 )     

Immigration and the unemployment benefit programme in Australia

A widely held view is that immigrants contribute to public debt through their over representation in the unemployment benefit programme. An empirical investigation, based on the 1990 Income Distribution Survey, finds support for this view. In contrast to the US and Canadian studies, this paper observes that the probability of receiving unemployment benefits is higher for immigrants than the native-born population and immigrants, who participate in the unemployment benefit programme, also receive a greater amount of unemployment benefits.     

非农就业、城镇化与城乡居民收入不均等

文章构建了城乡分割体制下的简单二元经济模型,从理论上分析非农就业、城镇化与城乡居民收入不均等的关系,并采用静态和SVAR动态方法进行实证研究。研究发现：总体上,非农就业与城乡居民收入不均等负相关,且长期内将持续缩小城乡收入不均等;城镇化以及城镇化滞后于非农就业的程度与城乡收入不均等正相关,且长期内均将扩大城乡收入不均等,但影响逐步衰减。最后基于产业梯度推移理论对实证结果进行了解释,并提供相关政策建议。     

中国居民消费与资产收益:基于收入群体的分析

The equity premium puzzle is found during the test of the Consumption-based Capital Asset Pricing Model (CCAPM) with aggregate consumption data. Because of income disparity, many consumers lack financial assets to intertemporally allocate their consumptions under income constraints. Thus, it is likely to lead to a specification error by employing aggregate consumption data to test the CCAPM. This paper examines the impacts of the economically constrained (low-income) consumers and unconstrained (high-income) consumers on the CCAPM using urban consumption expenditures in China delineated by consumer income, and tests the income constraint hypothesis. The empirical results show that the CCAPM is not more consistent with the consumption pattern of the higher-income consumers. Including the income constraint into the analyses of the consumption and asset returns does not unravel the equity premium puzzle.      

城乡居民消费差距与地区经济发展水平

经验观察发现,三十年来,我国省际城乡居民消费一直存在"经济发展越落后的地区,城乡居民消费差距越大"的现象。本文构建1978-2007年省际面板数据,基于不同模型的计量检验结果表明这种现象的存在,在经历了改革开放初期的"集体贫困"之后,这种现象在1980年代中期以后的二十年间显得尤为突出。而一些省份在经济发展到一定阶段后,城乡居民消费差距开始下降,这是未来发展的希望所在。本文还从社会发展、经济现状、政府行为、基础设施和对外贸易五个方面对影响省际城乡居民消费差距的因素进行了较为详细的考察,研究表明,加快农村基础设施建设、促进教育公平和完善农村社会保障体系等措施有助于迈向理想的共同富裕。     

Do Urban Neighborhoods Benefit from Homeowners? Evidence from Housing Prices

Homeownership is heavily subsidized in most countries. The adverse effects of this policy on economic efficiency and income distribution are well documented in the economics literature. The main argument in favor of subsidizing homeownership is that it creates positive externalities that offset these adverse effects. In this paper, we test whether homeowners create positive externalities that capitalize into housing prices in multi‐storey buildings. Using semi‐parametric hedonic regressions with and without instrumental variables, we find no evidence of positive externalities, although the results with instrumental variables are somewhat imprecise. This result is robust to several sensitivity checks and to a relaxation of the identification assumptions of our instrument using set identification.     

The effect of legal status on immigrant wages and occupational skills

Native and foreign-born workers with a high school degree or less education work in different types of occupations. This article exploits the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act to examine whether legal status causes immigrants to work in occupations that use skills similar to those of natives. Legal status decreases the manual skill intensity of immigrants’ occupations by about two percentiles. It increases communication skill intensity by a similar amount. This reduces the skill gap between Mexican-born and native-born American workers by 11–15%.     

Capital–skill complementarity and the immigration surplus

We build a neoclassical growth model with overlapping dynasties and capital–skill complementarities to evaluate changes in immigration policy. Calibrating the model using US data, we quantify the differential effects of skilled and unskilled immigration on factor returns and on the welfare of different sectors of the population. An influx of high-skilled immigrants lowers the wages of skilled workers, raises the wages of unskilled workers, and because of the relative complementarity between capital and skilled labor, substantially raises the rate of return to native-owned capital. By contrast, an influx of unskilled immigrants produces an opposite effect on wages, and has only a negligible effect on the return to capital. Because of capital–skill complementarity, an increase in the number of skilled immigrants generates an immigration surplus—the overall welfare benefit accruing to the native population—that is approximately ten times larger than the immigration surplus generated by an identical increase in the number of unskilled immigrants. This differential welfare effect is far higher than can be accounted for by the disparity between the productivities of each type of worker.     

The earnings of Canadian immigrant and native-born males

This paper examines the economic attainment of Canadian immigrants. Although foreign-born males initially earn less than the native-born, their earnings rise more rapidly with Canadian labour market experience, and after 14years their earnings equal and exceed those of the native population. It is also shown that the use of Mincer's identity leads to biased results when estimating the earnings of the immigrant population.