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Title: The Economic Impact, Location Choices and Assimilation of Immigrants

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2018

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Abstract: This dissertation consists of three self-contained essays. In the first chapter, I study the labor market impact of documented and undocumented immigration in a search model with non-random hiring that is parameterized based on wage and job finding rate gaps I find in US data. The model predicts that native workers benefit from undocumented immigration due to its strong job creation effect. In the second chapter, we document that immigrants in the US concentrate in large, expensive cities, where their earnings gap to natives is higher, and that they consume less local goods than natives. To explain these facts, we develop a quantitative spatial equilibrium model, in which immigrants consume a fraction of their income at their origin. The model suggests that by moving economic activity to more productive cities, immigration has led to an expansion in output per worker by around 0.3%. In the third chapter, we propose a unified framework that combines the approaches of the wage assimilation and the labor market impact literature by allowing both the accumulation of host country specific skills and general equilibrium effects to affect the relative wages of immigrants. We show that the latter can explain between 31% and 63% of the decline in entry wages experienced by the immigrant cohorts arriving in the US between the 1970s and the 1990s.

Url: https://www.tdx.cat/handle/10803/663489#page=21

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Authors: Albert, Christoph

Institution: Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Department: Departament d'Economia

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Pages: 154

Data Collections: IPUMS CPS

Topics: Migration and Immigration

Countries: United States