Rethinking the Gains from Immigration: Theory and Evidence from the U.S

Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri

No 11672, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Recent influential empirical work has emphasized the negative impact immigrants have on the wages of U.S.-born workers, arguing that immigration harms less educated American workers in particular and all U.S.-born workers in general. Because U.S. and foreign born workers belong to different skill groups that are imperfectly substitutable, one needs to articulate a production function that aggregates different types of labor (and accounts for complementarity and substitution effects) in order to calculate the various effects of immigrant labor on U.S.-born labor. We introduce such a production function, making the crucial assumption that U.S. and foreign-born workers with similar education and experience levels may nevertheless be imperfectly substitutable, and allowing for endogenous capital accumulation. This function successfully accounts for the negative impact of the relative skill levels of immigrants on the relative wages of U.S. workers. However, contrary to the findings of previous literature, overall immigration generates a large positive effect on the average wages of U.S.-born workers. We show evidence of this positive effect by estimating the impact of immigration on both average wages and housing values across U.S. metropolitan areas (1970-2000). We also reproduce this positive effect by simulating the behavior of average wages and housing prices in an open city-economy, with optimizing U.S.-born agents who respond to an inflow of foreign-born workers of the size and composition comparable to the immigration of the 1990s.

JEL-codes: F22 J31 J61 R13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-geo
Note: ITI LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (97)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11672.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Rethinking the Gains from Immigration: Theory and Evidence from the U.S (2006)
Working Paper: Rethinking the Gains from Immigration: Theory and Evidence from the U.S (2006)
Working Paper: Rethinking the Gains from Immigration: Theory and Evidence from the U.S (2005)
Working Paper: Rethinking the Gains from Immigration: Theory and Evidence from the US (2005)
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:nbr:nberwo:11672

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11672

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().