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Immigration, local crowd-out and undercoverage bias

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  • Michael Amior
Abstract
Using decadal census data since 1960, I cannot reject the hypothesis that new immigrants crowd out existing residents from US commuting zones and states one-for-one. My estimate accounts explicitly for dynamic local adjustment, it is statistically precise and robust to numerous specifications, and I show how it can be reconciled with apparently conflicting results in the literature. Exploiting my model's structure, I attribute 30% of the observed effect to mismeasurement, specifically undercoverage of new immigrants in the census. Based on a remarkably simple decomposition (and after adjusting for undercoverage), I show that population mobility accounts for 90% of local labor market adjustment (following an immigration shock), and labor demand the remainder. These results have important methodological implications for the estimation of immigration effects.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Amior, 2020. "Immigration, local crowd-out and undercoverage bias," CEP Discussion Papers dp1669, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1669
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    Cited by:

    1. Amior, Michael, 2020. "The contribution of immigration to local labor market adjustment," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 108419, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Glitz, Albrecht & Hörnig, Lukas & Körner, Konstantin & Monras, Joan, 2023. "The geography of refugee shocks," Ruhr Economic Papers 994, RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen.
    3. George J. Borjas & Anthony Edo, 2021. "Gender, Selection into Employment, and the Wage Impact of Immigration," NBER Working Papers 28682, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Amior, Michael & Stuhler, Jan, 2023. "Immigration, Monopsony and the Distribution of Firm Pay," IZA Discussion Papers 16692, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Christoph Albert & Joan Monràs, 2019. "The regional impact of economic shocks: Why immigration is different from import competition," Economics Working Papers 1758, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Dec 2020.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    immigration; geographical mobility; local labor markets; employment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
    • J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search
    • R23 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population

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