Full Citation

Title: Instrumenting for Immigration Using Push Factors of Origin Countries

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2019

ISBN:

ISSN:

DOI:

NSFID:

PMCID:

PMID:

Abstract: Identifying the impact of immigration on local labor markets has faced significant challenges because of the evident moving to opportunity bias, where immi-grants' locational choices are influenced by local labor demand shocks. I introduce a novel instrument for immigration, which is the predicted number of immigrants from the push factors of origin countries. Using a mixed effects model that incorporates both fixed and random effects, the actual number of immigrants in each city of United States is regressed on the push factors of the origin countries. Then, the predicted number of total immigrants in each city is obtained by the fitted values of the regression, which is used as an instrument for immigration. I show that the instrument strongly predicts current immigrant population and is less correlated with local labor demand shocks compared to the widely used shift-share instruments.

Url: http://heepyungcho.web.illinois.edu/docs/instrument.pdf

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Cho, Heepyung

Publisher: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration

Countries: United States