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Jel Classification:J61 

Working Paper
The Allocation of Immigrant Talent: Macroeconomic Implications for the U.S. and Across Countries

We quantify the labor market barriers that immigrants face, using an occupational choice model with native-born individuals and immigrants of multiple types subject to wedges that distort their allocations. We find sizable output gains from removing immigrant wedges in the U.S., representing 25% of immigrants' overall economic contribution, and that these wedges alter the impact of alternative immigration policies. We harmonize microdata across 19 economies and exploit cross-country variation in immigrant outcomes and estimated wedges to examine the drivers of differences in wedges and gains ...
Working Papers , Paper 2021-004

Working Paper
Is the grass really greener? Migrants' improvements in local labor market conditions and financial health

This paper documents several facts about internal migrants in the US that underlie substantial areas of economic research and policy making, but are rarely directly published. Using a large-sample, 23-year panel, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel, I estimate the distribution of changes in local labor market conditions experienced by people who move to a different labor market. Net migration favors local labor markets with lower unemployment and faster job growth, but gross flows toward weaker labor markets are almost as large as the flows toward stronger labor ...
Working Papers , Paper 22-04

Working Paper
Skills, Migration, and Urban Amenities Over the Life Cycle

We examine sorting behavior across metropolitan areas by skill over individuals’ life cycles. We show that high-skill workers disproportionately sort into high-amenity areas, but do so relatively early in life. Workers of all skill levels tend to move towards lower-amenity areas during their thirties and forties. Consequently, individuals’ time use and expenditures on activities related to local amenities are U-shaped over the life cycle. This contrasts with well-documented life-cycle consumption profiles, which have an opposite inverted-U shape. We present evidence that the move towards ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2025-01

Working Paper
Local Ties in Spatial Equilibrium

If someone lives in an economically depressed place, they were probably born there. The presence of people with local ties - a preference to live in their birthplace - leads to smaller migration responses. Smaller migration responses to wage declines lead to lower real incomes and make real incomes more sensitive to subsequent demand shocks, a form of hysteresis. Local ties can persist for generations. Place-based policies, like tax subsidies, targeting depressed places cause smaller distortions since few people want to move to depressed places. Place-based policies targeting productive ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2019-080

Working Paper
Irregular immigration in the European Union

Unauthorized immigration is on the rise again in the EU. Although precise estimates are hard to come by, proximity to nations in turmoil and the promise of a better life have drawn hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants to the EU in 2014-2015. Further complicating the ongoing challenge is the confounding flow of humanitarian migrants, who are fleeing not for a job but for their lives. Those who flee for better economic conditions are irregular migrants, not humanitarian migrants, but the lines between the two are often blurred. This policy brief surveys the state of irregular immigration ...
Working Papers , Paper 1603

Report
Geographical reallocation and unemployment during the Great Recession: the role of the housing bust

This paper quantitatively evaluates the hypothesis that the housing bust in 2007 decreased geographical reallocation and increased the dispersion and level of unemployment during the Great Recession. We construct an equilibrium model of multiple locations with frictional housing and labor markets. When house prices fall, the amount of home equity declines, making it harder for homeowners to afford the down payment on a new house after moving. Consequently, the decline in house prices reduces migration and causes unemployment to rise differently in different locations. The model accounts for ...
Staff Reports , Paper 605

Working Paper
Understanding the Long-Run Decline in Interstate Migration: Online Appendix

This appendix contains eight sections. Section 1 gives technical details of how we calculate standard errors in the CPS data. Section 2 discusses changes in the ACS procedures before 2005. Section 3 examines demographic and economic patterns in migration over the past two decades, in more detail than in the main paper. Section 4 examines the cross-sectional variance of location-occupation interactions in earnings when we define locations by MSAs instead of states. Section 5 describes alternative methods to estimate the variance of location-occupation interactions in income. Section 6 measures ...
Working Papers , Paper 725

Working Paper
How do e-verify mandates affect unauthorized immigrant workers?

A number of states have adopted laws that require employers to use the federal government?s E-Verify program to check workers? eligibility to work legally in the United States. Using data from the Current Population Survey, this study examines whether such laws affect labor market outcomes among Mexican immigrants who are likely to be unauthorized. We find evidence that E-Verify mandates reduce average hourly earnings among likely unauthorized male Mexican immigrants while increasing labor force participation and employment among likely unauthorized female Mexican immigrants. In contrast, the ...
Working Papers , Paper 1403

Report
Does Universal Occupational Licensing Recognition Improve Patient Access? Evidence from Healthcare Utilization

Optimizing physician labor supply has been an important policy issue in healthcare in the United States. One of the proposed solutions has been the universal licensing recognition (ULR), which allows out-of-state physicians to provide healthcare services without relicensing and increases the local labor supply of physicians. There has been no empirical analysis of the effect of such regulatory relaxation on the local labor supply and subsequent improvements of consumer welfare. In this study, we use the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to investigate the effect of universal ...
Staff Report , Paper 671

Working Paper
Immigrant language barriers and house prices

Are language skills important in explaining the nexus between house prices and immigrant inflows? The language barrier hypothesis says immigrants from a non common language country value amenities more than immigrants from common language countries.> ; In turn, immigrants from non common language countries are less price sensitive to house price changes than immigrants from a common language country. Tests of the language barrier hypothesis with Swiss house prices show that an immigration inflow from a non common language country equal to 1 percent of an area's population is coincident with ...
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 97

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Orrenius, Pia M. 12 items

Zavodny, Madeline 11 items

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