Immigration and Occupational Comparative Advantage

Gordon Hanson and Chen Liu

No 29418, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Job choice by high-skilled foreign-born workers in the US correlates strongly with country of origin. We apply a Fréchet-Roy model of occupational choice to evaluate the causes of immigrant sorting. In a gravity specification, we find that revealed comparative advantage in the US is stronger for workers from countries with higher education quality in occupations that are more intensive in cognitive reasoning, and for workers from countries that are more linguistically similar to the US in occupations that are more intensive in communication. Our findings hold for immigrants who arrived in the US at age 18 or older (who received their K-12 education abroad) but not for immigrants who arrived in the US as children (who received their K-12 education domestically). We obtain similar results for immigrant sorting in Canada, which supports our interpretation that origin-country education quality, rather than US immigration policy, is what drives sorting patterns. In counterfactual analysis, we evaluate the consequences of reallocating visas for college-educated immigrants according to origin-country education quality.

JEL-codes: F22 I25 J61 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int, nep-lab and nep-mig
Note: DEV ITI LS
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as Gordon Hanson & Chen Liu, 2023. "Immigration and occupational comparative advantage," Journal of International Economics, .

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