The Labor Market Effects of Refugee Waves: Reconciling Conflicting Results
Michael Clemens and
Jennifer Hunt
ILR Review, 2019, vol. 72, issue 4, 818-857
Abstract:
Studies have reached conflicting conclusions regarding the labor market effects of exogenous refugee waves such as the Mariel Boatlift in Miami. The authors show that contradictory findings on the effects of the Mariel Boatlift can be explained by a large difference in the pre- and post-Boatlift racial composition in certain very small subsamples of workers in the Current Population Survey. This compositional change is specific to Miami and unrelated to the Boatlift. They also show that conflicting findings on the labor market effects of other important refugee waves are caused by spurious correlation in some analyses between the instrument and the endogenous variable, introduced by applying a common divisor to both. As a whole, the evidence from refugee waves reinforces the existing consensus that the impact of immigration on average native-born workers is small, and it fails to substantiate claims of large detrimental effects on workers with less than a high school education.
Keywords: immigrant effects on employment; immigrants; immigration; immigration and labor markets; instrumental variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (87)
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793918824597 (text/html)
Related works:
Working Paper: The labor market effects of refugee waves: reconciling conflicting results (2017) 
Working Paper: The Labor Market Effects of Refugee Waves: Reconciling Conflicting Results (2017) 
Working Paper: The labor market effects of refugee waves: reconciling conflicting results (2017) 
Working Paper: The Labor Market Effects of Refugee Waves: Reconciling Conflicting Results (2017) 
Working Paper: The Labor Market Effects of Refugee Waves: Reconciling Conflicting Results (2017) 
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:sae:ilrrev:v:72:y:2019:i:4:p:818-857
DOI: 10.1177/0019793918824597
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in ILR Review from Cornell University, ILR School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().