Immigration, local crowd-out and undercoverage bias

Michael Amior

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Revised May 2020. Revised January 2021. 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 is precise and robust to numerous specifications, as well as accounting for local dynamics; 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 immigrants. Based on a remarkably simple decomposition, I show that population mobility accounts for 90% of local adjustment, and labor demand the remainder. These results have important methodological implications for the estimation of immigration effects.

Keywords: immigration; geographic mobility; local labor markets; employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J61 J64 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 85 pages
Date: 2020-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Immigration, local crowd-out and undercoverage bias (2020)
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