The Effect of Immigration on Native Self-Employment

Robert Fairlie and Bruce Meyer

IPR working papers from Institute for Policy Resarch at Northwestern University

Abstract: A rapidly growing literature examines the impact of immigrants on the labor market outcomes of native-born Americans. However, the impact of immigration on natives in self-employment has not been examined, despite the over-representation of immigrants in that sector. We first present a new general equilibrium model of self-employment and wage/salary work. For a range of plausible parameter values, the model predicts small negative effects of immigration on native self-employment rates and earnings. Using 1980 and 1990 Census microdata, we then examine the relationship between changes in immigration and native self-employment rates and earnings across 132 of the largest metro-politan areas in the United States. We find evidence supporting the hypothesis that self-employed immigrants displace self-employed natives. The effects are much larger than those predicted by simulations of the theoretical model. Immigrants, however, do not have a negative effect on native self-employment earnings. Our findings are similar if we weight immigration rates by the propensity of immigrant groups to be self-employed or if we try alternative estimation techniques and specifications.

New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nwu.edu/IPR/publications/papers/native.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.nwu.edu:80 (nodename nor servname provided, or not known)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Effect of Immigration on Native Self-Employment (2014)
Journal Article: The Effect of Immigration on Native Self-Employment (2003)
Working Paper: The Effect of Immigration on Native Self-Employment (2000)
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:wop:nwuipr:00-2

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IPR working papers from Institute for Policy Resarch at Northwestern University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Krichel ().