Recent immigrants as labor market arbitrageurs: Evidence from the minimum wage

Brian Cadena

Journal of Urban Economics, 2014, vol. 80, issue C, 1-12

Abstract: This paper investigates the local labor supply effects of changes to the minimum wage by examining the response of low-skilled immigrants’ location decisions. Canonical models emphasize the importance of labor mobility when evaluating the employment effects of the minimum wage; yet few studies address this outcome directly. Low-skilled immigrant populations shift toward labor markets with stagnant minimum wages, and this result is robust to a number of alternative interpretations. This mobility provides behavior-based evidence in favor of a non-trivial negative employment effect of the minimum wage. Further, it reduces the estimated demand elasticity using teens; employment losses among native teens are substantially larger in states that have historically attracted few immigrant residents.

Keywords: Minimum wage; Immigration; Labor mobility; Spatial equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J23 J38 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (50)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119013000806
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:juecon:v:80:y:2014:i:c:p:1-12

DOI: 10.1016/j.jue.2013.10.002

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Urban Economics is currently edited by S.S. Rosenthal and W.C. Strange

More articles in Journal of Urban Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().