Immigration Economics

Harvard University Press website

Amazon website

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1. The Selection of Immigrants
  • Chapter 2. Economic Assimilation
  • Chapter 3. Immigration and the Wage Structure: Theory
  • Chapter 4. The Wage Effects of Immigration: Descriptive Evidence
  • Chapter 5. The Wage Effects of Immigration: Structural Estimates
  • Chapter 6. Labor Market Adjustments to Immigration
  • Chapter 7. The Economic Benefits from Immigration
  • Chapter 8. High-Skill Immigration
  • Chapter 9. The Second Generation
  • Conclusion
  • Appendix A: Mathematical Notes
  • Appendix B: Construction of Data Extracts
  • References

Detailed Table of Contents Introduction

Chapter 1. The Selection of Immigrants

The Migration Decision
Why Are There So Few Immigrants?
The Roy Model
A Special Case of the Roy Model and Extensions
Linear Utility and "Generalized" Positive Selection
Evidence on Selection

Chapter 2. Economic Assimilation

The Identification of Aging and Cohort Effects
Evidence on Aging and Cohort Effects
A Model of Economic Assimilation
Empirical Determinants of Assimilation
Earnings Imputation: A Nontrivial Data Problem

Chapter 3. Immigration and the Wage Structure: Theory

Homogeneous Labor in a One-Good Closed Economy
Heterogeneous Labor in a One-Good Closed Economy
The Nested CES
A Two-Good Open Economy with Homogeneous Labor

Chapter 4. The Wage Effects of Immigration: Descriptive Evidence

Spatial Correlations
The National Labor Market
Sampling Eror and Attenuation Bias

Chapter 5. The Wage Effects of Immigration: Structural Estimates

A Nested CES Model
Simulating the Wage Effects of Immigration
Are "High School Equivalents" Equivalent?
Descriptive versus Structural Estimates

Chapter 6. Labor Market Adjustments to Immigration

Native Internal Migration
Firm Responses

Chapter 7. The Economic Benefits from Immigration

The Immigration Surplus with Homogeneous Labor
Heterogeneous Labor
The Global Gains from Open Borders

Chapter 8. High-Skill Immigration

A Model of Immigration and Human Capital Externalities
The Labor Market for Doctorates
High-Tech Immigration
Case Studies of High-Skill Immigration

Chapter 9. The Second Generation

Income Mobility in Immigrant Families
The Persistence of Ethnic Wage Differentials
Ethnic Capital

Conclusion

Appendix A: Mathematical Notes

Appendix B: Construction of Data Extracts

References

Acknowledgments

Index

Excerpt from the Introduction

A theme that recurs throughout the book is that immigration has consequences, and these consequences generally imply that some people lose while others benefit. The notion that immigration has both costs and benefits is somewhat foreign in the policy arena, where the lines of demarcation between the two extreme sides are clearly delineated, and immigration is almost always beneficial or almost always costly. In fact, both the theory and the data suggest repeatedly that costs and benefits matter, and the identification of these distributional consequences forms a core contribution of the economic approach.

A second theme is that the insights of the theoretical models and the findings from empirical analysis are not always robust to changes in the underlying assumptions or in econometric methods. Perhaps nowhere is this lesson clearer than in the literature that purports to estimate the impact of immigration on the wages of pre-existing workers in a host country. This literature has gone through several iterations in the 30 years since the initial studies were published. Each new generation of studies has certainly increased our understanding of the mechanics of the labor market impact, but each has also generated new empirical methods and evidence that often contradict what came before.

So let me succinctly state the question at the heart of this book: what does economics have to say about immigration and what do we have to assume to get it to say what we think it says? The presentation will often be critical and emphasize the need to be cautious in interpreting the implications of the models and the evidence. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that the economic analysis of immigration makes a valuable and unique contribution. If nothing else, it forces rigorous thinking and requires the delineation of the specific assumptions used in any examination of the determinants and consequences of international migration flows."

Data/Programs