Shift-Share Instruments and the Impact of Immigration

David Jaeger, Joakim Ruist and Jan Stuhler

No 2018-007, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: A large literature exploits geographic variation in the concentration of immigrants to identify their impact on a variety of outcomes. To address the endogeneity of immigrants' location choices, the most commonly-used instrument interacts national inflows by country of origin with immigrants' past geographic distribution. We present evidence that estimates based on this “shift-share†instrument conflate the short- and long-run responses to immigration shocks. If the spatial distribution of immigrant inflows is stable over time, the instrument is likely to be correlated with ongoing responses to previous supply shocks. Estimates based on the conventional shift-share instrument are therefore unlikely to identify the short-run causal effect. We propose a “multiple instrumentation†procedure that isolates the spatial variation arising from changes in the country-of-origin composition at the national level and permits us to estimate separately the short- and long-run effects. Our results are a cautionary tale for a large body of empirical work, not just on immigration, that rely on shift-share instruments for causal inference.

Keywords: immigration; geographic variation; shocks; multiple instrumentation; spatial analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C36 J15 J21 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-int, nep-ltv, nep-mig and nep-ure
Note: MIP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (297)

Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Jaeger ... pact-immigration.pdf First version, 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Shift-Share Instruments and the Impact of Immigration (2018)
Working Paper: Shift- Share Instruments and the Impact of Immigration (2018)
Working Paper: Shift-Share Instruments and the Impact of Immigration (2018)
Working Paper: Shift-Share Instruments and the Impact of Immigration (2018)
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:hka:wpaper:2018-007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon ().