EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Allocation of Immigrant Talent: Macroeconomic Implications for the U.S. and Across Countries

Serdar Birinci, Fernando Leibovici and Kurt See

No 2021-004, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Abstract: We quantify the labor market barriers that immigrants face, using an occupational choice model with natives and immigrants of multiple types subject to wedges that distort their allocations. We find sizable output gains from removing immigrant wedges in the U.S., representing 25% of immigrants' overall economic contribution, and that these wedges alter the impact of alternative immigration policies. We harmonize microdata across 19 economies and exploit cross-country variation in immigrant outcomes and estimated wedges to examine the drivers of differences in wedges and gains from their removal. Finally, we relate the estimated wedges with external cross-country measures of immigrant barriers.

Keywords: immigration; occupational barriers; mobility; misallocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J31 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66 pages
Date: 2021-04, Revised 2025-03-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-int, nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2021/2021-004.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedlwp:90705

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.20955/wp.2021.004

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Scott St. Louis ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-24
Handle: RePEc:fip:fedlwp:90705