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Title: Do Immigrants Promote Exports to Countries Other than Their Country of Origin? On the Role of Geographic and Linguistic Proximity

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2015

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Abstract: Immigrants have been found to promote exports to their countries of origin. In this study, we show that immigrants can also increase exports to other countries–specifically, countries that we term “proximate" to the country of origin. The proximity measure for a country pair is based on a geographical factor of sharing a common border and a cultural/linguistic factor of the probability of sharing a common native language; these factors reflect business networks, foreign market information and communication facilitation as channels of trade facilitation. The expected number of non-proximate immigrants is termed “distant" and is found to have a negative effect on exports to a given country. The trade effects of different immigrant groups are more pronounced among state-country pairs with a larger number of immigrants from the export destination country. We obtain state-country level estimates of immigration-export elasticity in the United States that are preferable to previously available estimates due to the use of proper trading-pair fixed effects and more recent data, covering 2003-2013. Analysis is done both at the aggregate state-country level and at the industry level, with the within- industry immigrant effect on industry exports being estimated for the first time for the case of the United States as the host country.

Url: https://www.isid.ac.in/~epu/acegd2015/papers/OlegFirsin.pdf

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Authors: Firsin, Oleg

Publisher: Indian Statistical Institute

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Migration and Immigration

Countries: United States