The labor market effects of refugee waves: reconciling conflicting results

Michael Clemens and Jennifer Hunt

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: An influential strand of research has tested for the effects of immigration on natives' wages and employment using exogenous refugee supply shocks as natural experiments. Several studies have reached conflicting conclusions about the effects of noted refugee waves such as the Mariel Boatlift in Miami and post-Soviet refugees to Israel. We show that conflicting findings on the effects of the Mariel Boatlift can be explained by a large difference in the pre- and post-Boatlift racial composition in subsamples of the Current Population Survey extracts. This compositional change is specific to Miami, unrelated to the Boatlift, and arises from selecting small subsamples of workers. We also show that conflicting findings on the labor market effects of other important refugee waves are caused by spurious correlation 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 fails to substantiate claims of large detrimental impacts on workers with less than high school.

Keywords: refugees; immigration; instrumental variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J61 O15 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-07-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (63)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1491.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Labor Market Effects of Refugee Waves: Reconciling Conflicting Results (2019)
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:cep:cepdps:dp1491

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().