The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit

(ii) development of

Abstract: Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005, precipitating a mass outmigration of evacuees from the U.S. Gulf Coast region. A substantial number of evacuees fled to the Houston, TX metropolitan area, where the population rose by 3.8 percent. Using data from the September, 2000-August, 2006 Current Population Surveys, I compare wages and employment among non-evacuees in Houston and other metro areas, before and after the storm. I find that Hurricane Katrina migration was associated with a 1.8 percent drop in wages and a 0.5 percentage point drop in the probability of being employed among native Houstonians, where both estimates are statistically significant at conventional levels. In addition, women, more-educated individuals, and non-minorities seem to be more adversely affected by Katrina migration than men, less-educated individuals, and minorities, respectively. However, these differences can be accounted for by taking into consideration the industrial or occupational distribution of evacuees and non-evacuees in the Houston metro area. My main findings suggest that Hurricane Katrina migration had a modest negative effect on labor market outcomes for native Houstonians.

Over the last 30 years, the U.S. labor market has been transformed by the ’second great migration’. Much of this immigration has been among the lower skilled; the share of High School Dropout (HSD) workers who are foreign born increased from 12 % in 1980 to 44 % in 2007. At the same time, native born HSD workers grew more slowly than any other educational category, falling by nearly 6%. These two outcomes have inevitably lead to much speculation that immigrants depress the wages of similarly skilled natives. The labor economics literature, however, has found little empirical evidence to support this claim. We aim to assess whether the impact of immigration is mitigated by occupational transition of natives. Being over represented among HSDs, we focus on the labor market outcomes for Black workers. We use data from the 5 % public use sample of the census(1980, 1990 and 2000) as well as the 1 % sample of the population from the American Community Survey (2005, 2006 and 2007) to estimate the effect of occupational reallocation on the wages of Black workers as well as the effect of immigration on reallocation. A shift-share analysis reveals that occupational transitions caused wages for Blacks to raise by 46 % more than they would have with a static occupational distribution. However, we find that these occupational shifts were due to crowding out effect of Hispanics on Black occupations: a 10 percentage point increase in the share of workers in an occupation who are Hispanics leads to a 5 percentage point decrease in the share of Black workers in that occupation. This is significantly large to explain substantially occupations that declined in importance for Blacks during the period of study. We find a strong correlation between importance of occupations to Hispanics and Blacks, suggesting that most occupational transition for these two groups has not only been driven by outside factors such as trade and 1 technological change, but that these shocks are affecting the two groups similarly. Preliminary draft, please do not cite. Comments are welcome ( Research has been supported by a grant from the University of California

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, ethnic Germans living in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were given the opportunity to migrate to Germany. Within 15 years, 2.8 million individuals had done so. Upon arrival, these immigrants were exogenously allocated to different regions to ensure an even distribution across the country. Their inflow can therefore be seen as a quasi-experiment of immi-gration. I analyze the effect of these inflows on skill-specific em-ployment rates and wages. The results indicate a displacement effect of 3.1 unemployed workers for every 10 immigrants that find a job, but no effect on relative wages. I.

employment: An analytical review of

The Population Studies Centre (PSC) was established at the University of Waikato in 1982. POPULATIONS STUDIES CENTRE DISCUSSION PAPERS are intended as a forum for the publication of selected papers on research within the Centre, for the discussion and comment within the research community and among policy analysts prior to more formal refereeing and publication. Discussion Papers can be obtained in pdf form from the centre’s website at

employment: An analytical review of

Abstract- The increasing proportion of immigrants in the population of many countries has raised concerns about the ‘absorption capacity ’ of the labour market, and fuelled extensive empirical research in countries that attract migrants. In previous papers we synthesized the conclusions of this empirical literature by means of meta-analyses of the impact of immigration on wages and employment of native-born workers. While we have shown that the labour market impacts in terms of wages and employment are rather small, the sample of studies available to generate comparable effect sizes was severely limited by the heterogeneity in study approaches. In the present paper, we take an encompassing approach and consider a broad range of labour market outcomes: wages, employment, unemployment and labour force participation. We compare 45 primary studies published between 1982 and 2007 for a total of 1,572 effect sizes. We trichotomise the various labour market outcomes as benefiting, harming or not affecting the native born, and use an ordered probit model to assess the relationship between this observed impact and key study characteristics such as type of country, methodology, period of investigation and type of migrant.

Different U.S. states have been affected by immigration to very different extents in recent years. Immigration increases available workers in a state economy and, because of its composition across education groups, it also increases the relative supply of less educated workers. However, immigration is more than a simple labor supply shock. It brings differentiated skills and more competition to the labor market and it may induce efficient specialization and affect the choice of techniques. Immigrants also affect investments, capital accumulation, and the productivity of more and less educated workers. Using a production function-based procedure and data on gross state product, physical capital and hours worked we analyze the impact of immigration on production factors (capital, more and less educated labor), and productivity over the period 1960-2006 for 50 U.S. states plus D.C. We apply growth accounting techniques to the panel of states in order to identify the changes in factors and productivity associated with immigration. To identify a causal impact we use the part of immigration that is determined by supply shifts in countries of