The Short- and Long-Run Determinants of Less-Educated Immigration into U.S. States

Nicole Simpson and Chad Sparber

No 6437, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper uses a gravity model of migration to analyze how income differentials affect the flow of immigrants into U.S. states using annual data from the American Community Survey. We add to existing literature by decomposing income differentials into short- and long-term components and by focusing on newly arrived less-educated immigrants between 2000-2009. Our sample is unique in that 95 percent of our observed immigrant flows equal zero. We accommodate for the zeros by using scaled ordinary least squares, a threshold tobit model from Eaton and Tamura (1994), and the two-part model to analyze the determinants of immigration. Models that include observations with zero flow values find that recent male immigrants respond to differences in (short-term) GDP fluctuations between origin countries and U.S. states, and perhaps to (long-term) trend GDP differences as well. More specifically, short-run GDP fluctuations pull less-educated male immigrants into certain U.S. states, whereas GDP trends push less-educated male immigrants out of their countries of origin. Effects for less-educated women are less robust, as GDP coefficient magnitudes tend to be much smaller than in regressions for men.

Keywords: gravity; immigration; macroeconomics; GDP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E01 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2012-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Southern Economic Journal, 2013, 80(2), 414-438

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6437.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:iza:izadps:dp6437

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().