Worker Responses to Immigration Across Firms: Evidence from Colombia

Lukas Delgado-Prieto

No 26041, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: The labor market effects of immigration depend on how firms adjust, yet this aspect remains unexplored in developing countries. This paper studies the mass influx of Venezuelan migrants into Colombia using employer-employee data. As immigrants concentrate in informal employment, formal employment for minimum-wage natives falls, reflecting their substitutability with lower-cost informal workers. The negative effects are stronger in small formal firms, which rely more on informality. A machine learning analysis shows that firm-level factors explain more of the heterogeneity in worker-level impacts. These findings highlight that informality amplifies firms' role in shaping workers' immigration adjustments.

Keywords: Immigration; Minimum wages; Formal labor markets; Causal forest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 O15 O17 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/26041.pdf (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:crm:wpaper:26041

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Moritz Lubczyk () and Matthew Nibloe ().