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Full-Text Articles in Labor Economics

How Migrants Fleeing The Mexican Drug War Changed American Labor Markets, Mark Borgschulte, Yuci Chen, Eduardo Medina-Cortina Jul 2026

How Migrants Fleeing The Mexican Drug War Changed American Labor Markets, Mark Borgschulte, Yuci Chen, Eduardo Medina-Cortina

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.


How Changes In Mexican Immigration To The United States Affect Mexican Labor Markets, Gonzalo Ares De Parga-Regalado, Marta Prato May 2026

How Changes In Mexican Immigration To The United States Affect Mexican Labor Markets, Gonzalo Ares De Parga-Regalado, Marta Prato

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.


How Changes In Mexican Immigration To The United States Affect Mexican Labor Markets, Gonzalo Ares De Parga-Regalado, Marta Prato Mar 2026

How Changes In Mexican Immigration To The United States Affect Mexican Labor Markets, Gonzalo Ares De Parga-Regalado, Marta Prato

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.


The Effects Of Declining U.S. Immigration On Local Labor Markets In Mexico, Gonzalo Ares De Parga-Regalado, Marta Prato Mar 2026

The Effects Of Declining U.S. Immigration On Local Labor Markets In Mexico, Gonzalo Ares De Parga-Regalado, Marta Prato

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper examines how declining migration opportunities to the United States affect local labor markets in Mexico. Using novel micro-level data from consular identification cards and deportations, we link individuals’ Mexican municipalities of origin to their U.S. destination states. We implement a shift-share design based on historical migration networks and exploit regional variation in exposure to changes in U.S. migration flows between 2017 and 2022 to identify the local labor market effects of reduced emigration while controlling for involuntary repatriations. While we find no impact on overall employment rates, regions more exposed to the decline in migration experience an increase …


Migration And U.S. Labor Market Effects Of The Mexican Drug War, Mark Borgschulte, Yuci Chen, Eduardo Medina-Cortina Oct 2025

Migration And U.S. Labor Market Effects Of The Mexican Drug War, Mark Borgschulte, Yuci Chen, Eduardo Medina-Cortina

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We estimate the effect of the Mexican drug war on Mexico-to-U.S. migration and the resulting effects on population, employment, and wages in U.S. labor markets. Our empirical strategy compares U.S. counties differentially connected to Mexican municipalities through historical migration networks, using drug violence triggered by close municipal elections in 2007–2008 as a source of exogenous variation. Over the following decade, migrants fleeing the violence—the vast majority of whom are undocumented—cause native-born U.S. workers’ employment rates to increase and unemployment rates to fall, while wages do not change. Employment gains are largest for natives without a college degree. Employment effects fade …


How The H-2b Visa Lottery Helped Businesses During Covid, Parag Mahajan Jul 2025

How The H-2b Visa Lottery Helped Businesses During Covid, Parag Mahajan

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.


The Labor Supply Curve Is Upward Sloping: The Effects Of Immigrant-Induced Demand Shocks, Sigurd Galaasen, Andreas Kostøl, Joan Monras, Jonathan Vogel Jun 2025

The Labor Supply Curve Is Upward Sloping: The Effects Of Immigrant-Induced Demand Shocks, Sigurd Galaasen, Andreas Kostøl, Joan Monras, Jonathan Vogel

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

What is the effect of immigration on native labor-market outcomes? An extensive literature identifies the differential impact of immigration on natives employed in jobs that are more exposed to immigrant labor (supply exposure). But immigrants consume in addition to producing output. Despite this, no literature identifies the impact on natives employed in jobs that are more exposed to immigrant consumption (demand exposure). We study native labor market effects of supply and demand exposures to immigration. Theoretically, we formalize both measures of exposure and solve for their effects on native wages. Empirically, we combine employer-employee data with a newly collected data …


How The H-2b Visa Lottery Helped Businesses During Covid, Parag Mahajan Apr 2025

How The H-2b Visa Lottery Helped Businesses During Covid, Parag Mahajan

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.


“Essential” Migrants: Evidence From The 2020 H-2b Visa Lottery, Parag Mahajan Apr 2025

“Essential” Migrants: Evidence From The 2020 H-2b Visa Lottery, Parag Mahajan

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

I study how access to foreign-born workers impacts firms and local economics in times of acute crisis. The 2020 H-2B visa lottery randomly gave some U.S. firms the chance to hire low-wage, migrant workers during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using administrative data across three government agencies, I find that access to H-2B workers led to decreased business closures, increased revenues, increased payroll, and increased employment in 2020. I also find suggestive evidence that these effects spilled over to non-participant firms within the same county.


Emerging Giants And Lessons For Development: China, India, And Their Different Paths To Progress, Eskander Alvi Editor, Wei-Chiao Huang Editor Apr 2024

Emerging Giants And Lessons For Development: China, India, And Their Different Paths To Progress, Eskander Alvi Editor, Wei-Chiao Huang Editor

Upjohn Press

This book explores the differences and commonalities in growth experiences of two looming economic giants, China and India—countries that follow often-contrasting economic, social, and political paths as they struggle to achieve long-term prosperity for their billion-plus populations. The papers included within show that the economic and political realities in the two countries are quite different, and that these realities are deeply embedded in each country’s social framework. China and India are at markedly different stages of economic development but the challenges facing the two countries, unsurprisingly, diverge—not only because of the different stage of development each has reached, but also …


Daca, Mobility Investments, And Economic Outcomes Of Immigrants And Natives, Jimena Villanueva Kiser, Riley Wilson Jan 2024

Daca, Mobility Investments, And Economic Outcomes Of Immigrants And Natives, Jimena Villanueva Kiser, Riley Wilson

Upjohn Institute Policy and Research Briefs

No abstract provided.


Daca, Mobility Investments, And Economic Outcomes Of Immigrants And Natives, Jimena Villanueva Kiser, Riley Wilson Jan 2024

Daca, Mobility Investments, And Economic Outcomes Of Immigrants And Natives, Jimena Villanueva Kiser, Riley Wilson

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Exploiting variation created by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), we document the effects of immigrant legalization on immigrant mobility investments and economic outcomes. We provide new evidence that DACA increased both geographic and job mobility of young immigrants, often leading them to high-paying labor markets and licensed occupations. We then examine whether these gains to immigrants spill over and affect labor market outcomes of U.S.-born workers. Exploiting immigrant enclaves and source-country flows of DACA-eligible immigrants to isolate plausibly exogenous variation in the concentration of DACA recipients, we show that in labor markets where more of the working-age population can …


Information, Intermediaries, And International Migration, Samuel Bazzi, Lisa Cameron, Simone Schaner, Firman Witoelar Aug 2022

Information, Intermediaries, And International Migration, Samuel Bazzi, Lisa Cameron, Simone Schaner, Firman Witoelar

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Job seekers face substantial information frictions, especially in international labor markets where intermediaries match prospective migrants with overseas employers. We conducted a randomized trial in Indonesia to explore how information about intermediary quality shapes migration outcomes. Holding access to information about the return to choosing a high-quality intermediary constant, intermediary-specific quality disclosure reduces the migration rate, cutting use of low-quality providers. Workers who do migrate receive better pre-departure preparation and have improved experiences abroad, despite no change in occupation or destination. These results are not driven by changes in beliefs about average provider quality or the return to migration. Nor …


Income Generation Through Entrepreneurship: Seed Initiative, Iliana G. Perez May 2022

Income Generation Through Entrepreneurship: Seed Initiative, Iliana G. Perez

External Papers and Reports

No abstract provided.


Labor Market Consequences Of Antitax Avoidance Policies, Katarzyna Bilicka Oct 2021

Labor Market Consequences Of Antitax Avoidance Policies, Katarzyna Bilicka

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

In this paper, I analyze the local labor market consequences of multinational firms reallocating employees across their affiliates in response to antitax avoidance policies. I leverage the introduction of a worldwide debt cap in 2010 in the United Kingdom as a quasi-natural experiment that limited one of the forms of profit shifting—debt shifting—for a group of multinational corporations (MNCs). Multinationals affected by the reform reallocated their employees from the United Kingdom to foreign locations. This affected London-based service sector firms the most. I show that this led to a reduction in the number of jobs available in regions exposed to …


When Labor Enforcement And Immigration Enforcement Collide: Deterring Worker Complaints Worsens Workplace Safety, Amanda M. Grittner, Matthew S. Johnson Oct 2021

When Labor Enforcement And Immigration Enforcement Collide: Deterring Worker Complaints Worsens Workplace Safety, Amanda M. Grittner, Matthew S. Johnson

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Regulatory agencies overseeing the labor market often rely on worker complaints to direct their enforcement. However, if workers face differential barriers to complain, this system could result in ineffective targeting and create disparities in working conditions. To investigate these implications, we examine how the onset of Secure Communities—a localized immigration enforcement program—affected occupational safety and health. Counties’ participation in Secure Communities substantially reduced complaints to government safety regulators, but increased injuries, at workplaces with Hispanic workers. We show that these effects are most consistent with employers reducing safety inputs in response to workers’ decreased willingness to complain.


Trade And Structural Change: Focusing On The Specifics, Andrew Greenland, John W. Lopresti Jun 2021

Trade And Structural Change: Focusing On The Specifics, Andrew Greenland, John W. Lopresti

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Using a newly digitized database encompassing the universe of tariff lines across five US trade policy regimes between 1900 and 1940, we show that price dynamics combine with industry reliance on specific tariffs to generate large swings in average tariff levels. Intra-policy variation in tariffs is strongly predictive of import growth throughout our sample. Using linked Census data, we quantify the effects of imports on structural change in this era. We find that import growth decreases labor force participation and inhibits the transition into the expanding manufacturing and service sectors, especially among the young.


Globalization, Trade Imbalances, And Labor Market Adjustment, Rafael Dix-Carneiro, João Paulo Pessoa, Ricardo Reyes-Heroles, Sharon Traiberman Mar 2021

Globalization, Trade Imbalances, And Labor Market Adjustment, Rafael Dix-Carneiro, João Paulo Pessoa, Ricardo Reyes-Heroles, Sharon Traiberman

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We study the role of global trade imbalances in shaping the adjustment dynamics in response to trade shocks. We build and estimate a general equilibrium, multicountry, multisector model of trade with two key ingredients: 1) consumption-saving decisions in each country commanded by representative households, leading to endogenous trade imbalances, and 2) labor market frictions across and within sectors, leading to unemployment dynamics and sluggish transitions to shocks. We use the estimated model to study the behavior of labor markets in response to globalization shocks, including shocks to technology, trade costs, and intertemporal preferences (savings gluts). We find that modeling trade …


Strategic Reshoring: A Literature Review, Kathleen Bolter, Jim Robey Sep 2020

Strategic Reshoring: A Literature Review, Kathleen Bolter, Jim Robey

Reports

No abstract provided.


The Political Economy Of Inequality: U.S. And Global Dimensions, Sisay Asefa Editor, Wei-Chiao Huang Editor Mar 2020

The Political Economy Of Inequality: U.S. And Global Dimensions, Sisay Asefa Editor, Wei-Chiao Huang Editor

Upjohn Press

The contributors to this book discuss a variety of forms of social inequality which include large gaps in accumulated assets, discrepancies in access to quality education, unstable family life, lack of access to banking services, poor employment prospects, lack of health care services, and underrepresentation for political and legal matters. Together, they show how these forms of inequality are interrelated with income inequality and that, taken together, they pose the risk for societal and political unrest should they be left unresolved.


Immigration Policy Today, Susan Pozo Jul 2018

Immigration Policy Today, Susan Pozo

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.


Understanding The Decline Of U.S. Manufacturing Employment, Susan N. Houseman Jun 2018

Understanding The Decline Of U.S. Manufacturing Employment, Susan N. Houseman

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

U.S. manufacturing experienced a precipitous and historically unprecedented decline in employment in the 2000s. Many economists and other analysts—pointing to decades of statistics showing that manufacturing real (inflation-adjusted) output growth has largely kept pace with private sector real output growth, that productivity growth has been much higher, and that the sector’s share of aggregate employment has been declining—argue that manufacturing’s job losses are largely the result of productivity growth (assumed to reflect automation) and are part of a long-term trend. Since the 1980s, however, the apparently robust growth in manufacturing real output and productivity have been driven by a relatively …


Understanding The Effects Of Legalizing Undocumented Immigrants, Joan Monras, Javier Vázquez-Grenno, Ferran Elias Feb 2018

Understanding The Effects Of Legalizing Undocumented Immigrants, Joan Monras, Javier Vázquez-Grenno, Ferran Elias

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper investigates the consequences of the legalization of around 600,000 immigrants by the unexpectedly elected Spanish government of Zapatero following the terrorist attacks of March 2004 (Garcia-Montalvo, 2011). Using detailed data from payroll-tax revenues, we estimate that each newly legalized immigrant increased local payroll-tax revenues by 4,189 euros on average. This estimate is only 55 percent of what we would have expected from the size of the influx of newly documented immigrants, which suggests that newly legalized immigrants probably earned lower wages than other workers and maybe affected the labor-market outcomes of those other workers. We estimate that the …


Understanding The Decline In Manufacturing Employment, Susan N. Houseman Jan 2018

Understanding The Decline In Manufacturing Employment, Susan N. Houseman

Presentations

No abstract provided.


The Impacts Of China's Rise On The Pacific And The World, Wei-Chiao Huang Editor, Huizhong Zhou Editor Jan 2018

The Impacts Of China's Rise On The Pacific And The World, Wei-Chiao Huang Editor, Huizhong Zhou Editor

Upjohn Press

This book provides the perspectives of a group of noted China experts on how China’s economic expansion and internal reforms are impacting its neighbors in the Pacific region as well as the United States and the rest of the world.


Charles Ballard Interview, Justin Carinci Sep 2017

Charles Ballard Interview, Justin Carinci

External Papers and Reports

Professor Charles Ballard of Michigan State University delivered the lecture “The Fall and Rise of Income Equality in the United States” Sept. 27, 2017 as part of the Werner Sichel Lecture Series at Western Michigan University. Ballard detailed the “Great Convergence” of income equality in the United States that grew out of policies of the 1930s and 1940s and a “Great Divergence” of inequality starting about 1980. Ballard called this income gap, which is now greater than during the Gilded Age, “the largest economic phenomenon of our lifetimes.”


Testing The Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek Theory With A Natural Experiment, Assaf Zimring Dec 2015

Testing The Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek Theory With A Natural Experiment, Assaf Zimring

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper uses the historical episode of the near-elimination of commuting from the West Bank into Israel, which caused a large and rapid expansion of the local labor force in the West Bank, to test the predictions of the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) mode of trade. I use variation between districts in the West Bank to test these predictions, and find strong support for them: Wage changes were not correlated with the size of the shock to the district labor force (Factor Price Insensitivity); Districts that received larger influx of returning commuters shifted production more towards labor intensive industries (Rybczynski effect); And …


Trade Reform And Regional Dynamics: Evidence From 25 Years Of Brazilian Matched Employer-Employee Data, Rafael Dix-Carneiro, Brian K. Kovak Apr 2015

Trade Reform And Regional Dynamics: Evidence From 25 Years Of Brazilian Matched Employer-Employee Data, Rafael Dix-Carneiro, Brian K. Kovak

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We empirically study the dynamics of labor market adjustment following the Brazilian trade reform of the 1990s. We use variation in industry-specific tariff cuts interacted with initial regional industry mix to measure trade-induced local labor demand shocks, and then examine regional and individual labor market responses to those one-time shocks over two decades. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we do not find that the impact of local shocks is dissipated over time through wage-equalizing migration. Instead, we find steadily growing effects of local shocks on regional formal sector wages and employment for 20 years. This finding can be rationalized in a …


The Role Of Manufacturing In A Jobs Recovery, Susan N. Houseman Apr 2014

The Role Of Manufacturing In A Jobs Recovery, Susan N. Houseman

External Papers and Reports

No abstract provided.


Outsourcing And Offshoring: Problems For Price And Productivity Measurement, Susan N. Houseman Sep 2010

Outsourcing And Offshoring: Problems For Price And Productivity Measurement, Susan N. Houseman

Conference Papers

No abstract provided.