Immigration, local crowd-out and undercoverage bias

Michael Amior

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Using decadal census data since 1960, I cannot reject the hypothesis that new immigrants crowd out existing residents from US commuting zones and states one-for-one. My estimate accounts explicitly for dynamic local adjustment, it is statistically precise and robust to numerous specifications, and I show how it can be reconciled with apparently conflicting results in the literature. Exploiting my model's structure, I attribute 30% of the observed effect to mismeasurement, specifically undercoverage of new immigrants in the census. Based on a remarkably simple decomposition (and after adjusting for undercoverage), I show that population mobility accounts for 90% of local labor market adjustment (following an immigration shock), and labor demand the remainder. These results have important methodological implications for the estimation of immigration effects.

Keywords: immigration; geographical mobility; local labor markets; employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J61 J64 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-01-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-his, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Working Paper: Immigration, local crowd-out and undercoverage bias (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1669

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