Full Citation
Title: The Effect of Immigration on Native Workers: Evidence from the US Construction Sector
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2017
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Abstract: This paper provides new estimates of the short-run impacts of immigration on the employment opportunities of US-born workers. We focus on the constructor sector, a primary employer of immigrant workers in the US and one of the economic sectors with the highest share of immigrants, about 29% in 2016 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Using panel data at the metropolitan area-year level of aggregation constructed from US Census and American Community Survey data, we find that a 10 percentage point increase in the share of immigrant workers reduces annual earnings of US-born construction workers by at least 4.1%, with workers in immigrant-prone trades experiencing earnings reductions in excess of 7.2%. These bounds are derived using a so-called “imperfect instrument approach” (Nevo and Rosen, 2012), whereby the share of immigrant workers is instrumented by the share of immigrants across all sectors of the economy. Our partial identification strategy relies on the assumptions that the share of immigrants across all economic sectors in a market is positively correlated with construction-specific labor demand shocks about location and year effects, but less so than the share of immigrants in construction. Our results further indicate that US-born workers experience lower annual wages through reduced employment (fewer weeks worked per year) rather than lower weekly wages.
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Authors: Merel, Pierre; Rutledge, Zach
Publisher: University of California, Davis
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration
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