The educational distribution of U.S. immigrants shifted significantly to the right in recent decades as the share without a high school diploma fell and the share with a bachelor's degree rose. This improvement coincided with a shift in immigrants' origins toward Asia and rising global education...

Immigrants across Europe earn less and work in lower-quality jobs than natives, but the mechanisms underlying these disparities remain poorly understood. This paper asks whether immigrant disadvantage reflects barriers to accessing good jobs or skill deficits that persist even within similar...

This paper shows that immigrants not only have differential effects on trade based on their skill levels but that they play an additional role in facilitating bilateral trade if their origin country has a higher level of corruption and weaker institutions. Using immigrant stock across skill...

This paper estimates the causal impact of Brexit on migrant employment in the United Kingdom using a synthetic difference-in-differences (SDID) framework. We construct a counterfactual trajectory for the UK based on a weighted combination of comparable European economies and compare...

The educational distribution of U.S. immigrants shifted significantly to the right in recent decades as the share without a high school diploma fell and the share with a bachelor's degrees rose. This improvement coincided with a shift in immigrants' origins toward Asia and rising global...

The H-1B program lets firms hire high-skill foreign workers for a six-year term. The annual number of visas allocated to for-profit firms is capped at 85,000 and there is excess demand for those visas. The analysis merges administrative data, including the I-129 petitions that report the wage...

We provide causal evidence that immigration has contributed to the polarization of American politics. Using an ancestry-based shift-share instrument, we study immigration flows into U.S. counties between 1992 and 2016. Counties exposed to larger immigrant inflows become more polarized both in...

This paper studies the impact of birthright citizenship on youth crime. We leverage a reform which automatically granted birthright citizenship to eligible immigrant children born in Germany after January 1, 2000 and administrative crime data from three federal states. Immigrant youth who...

The US government in 2025 imposed a $100,000 tax on each high-skill foreign worker entering with an H-1B work visa. The only public economic justification calculates the tax to offset an estimated wage penalty for H-1B workers relative to US natives. But this estimate suffers from substantial...

We examine the wage returns to host-country work experience among immigrants by reconstructing full employment histories using Swedish pension records and longitudinal matched employer–employee data. Our findings show that: (i) returns to experience are sizable and concave, consistent with...

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...

This paper studies the impact of birthright citizenship on youth crime. We leverage a reform which automatically granted birthright citizenship to eligible immigrant children born in Germany after January 1, 2000 and administrative crime data from three federal states. Immigrant youth who...

This paper reexamines the trade creation effects of migration using a large sample of 180 countries from 1995 to 2023. We estimate a structural gravity model of bilateral trade augmented with migration stocks, investigating whether immigration to OECD countries relates to the extensive and...

Immigration was central both to the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign and to the political narratives that followed it. Yet the trajectory of migration to the UK since the referendum bears little resemblance to the expectations - or promises - articulated at the time. This paper provides an...

This paper studies the causal impact of language skills on human capital accumulation, labor market outcomes, and job characteristics of childhood immigrants across European countries. Using PIAAC data, we adopt an instrumental variable strategy based on the critical age hypothesis and...

Immigration has become a central driver of U.S. labor force growth. We document new empirical findings that shed light on the relationships between immigration, labor shortages, wage growth, and job openings during the high-immigration period of 2021-2024. The textbook search-and-matching model...

his paper investigates how immigration affects consumer prices. Using scanner data and instrumenting county-level immigration with historical ancestry patterns, we find that an inflow of 10,000 immigrants lowers four-year price growth by 0.58 percentage points. Leveraging variation in firm...

Migration is vividly considered to be a particular challenge for extended welfare states like the Nordics since high taxes and entitlement to the social safety net and provision of welfare services may create both pull and push effects in migration. The financial viability of the model is...

This chapter offers a novel approach to analyzing the effects of immigration on labor markets by structuring the discussion around a conceptual framework that links empirical estimates to fundamental structural parameters. This framework facilitates a clear interpretation and comparison of the...

Background: Many refugees arrived in Germany in 2015 and 2016. At the same time, anti-refugee attitudes among Germans increased. This indicates an association between immigration and attitudes. Now, ten years later, renewed public concern about immigration - while not many immigrate to Germany -...

We study the labour market impact of immigration to the United Kingdom, focusing on the large inflows following the 2004 EU enlargement. Using the Lifetime Labour Market Database (LLMDB) - a longitudinal 1% sample of National Insurance records - we provide the first analysis of immigration's...

In "Immigration, search and redistribution: A quantitative assessment of native welfare," a paper by Battisti et al. published in the August 2018 issue of the Journal of the European Economic Association, the authors inquire about how migration to 20 Organization for Economic Cooperation and...

We study how the labor market shocks of automation and immigration interact to shape workers' outcomes. Using matched employer-employee data from Norwegian administrative registers, we combine an immigration shock triggered by the European Union's 2004 enlargement with an automation shock based...

Most studies on the labor market effects of immigration use repeated cross-sectional data to estimate the effects of immigration on regions. This paper shows that such regional effects are composites of effects that address fundamental questions in the immigration debate but remain unidentified...

With the growing trend in migration, studying the environmental effects of such international movements is becoming a controversial debate. Thus, the present study for the first time investigates the effects of immigration on environmental degradation in 19 European countries from 2000 to 2019....

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,...

We study how the labor market shocks of automation and immigration interact to shape workers’ outcomes. Using matched employer–employee data from Norwegian administrative registers, we combine an immigration shock triggered by the European Union’s 2004 enlargement with an automation shock...

We study how low and medium-skilled refugee immigration affects natives’ labor market outcomes. Using individual-level panel data on the German workforce for 2011-2019 and exogenous regional variation from processing authorities’ distances, we find that a larger inflow of refugees to a...

The European Union population is ageing increasingly rapidly, with dependency ratios and shares of the elderly in the total population rising across the continent. While aggregate projected increases in age-related public spending in the EU are manageable, there are substantial differences...