A sudden decline in low-skilled immigrant workers in 2020 increased the exit of manufacturing firms in Korea and decreased wages of Korean workers, from Jongkwan Lee, Giovanni Peri, and Hee-Seung Yang www.nber.org/papers/w34927
America's status as the top destination for global talent is being shattered.
The Administration only just published (!) what happened last summer to international student visa issuances. It's grim.
From the indispensable @karinfischer.bsky.social @chronicle.com —> chronicle.com/newsletter/l...
Pretty crazy how important the blockade of a trade route is right now
"I say unto you, pray for your enemies."
📣 Hot off the press 📣
We document tremendous growth in U.S. federal place-based funding, show it has disproportionately gone to areas with more nonprofits & stronger housing markets, and find a pattern of cumulative advantage in funding among high-poverty neighborhoods.
doi.org/10.1093/sf/s...
How should elected officials divine voters’ preferences about building more homes: through broad-based polls or the 12 people who show up at a community meeting on Tuesday night and yell for hours? Hard to say…
A strongly worded letter isn't gonna cut it.
There is a lot more detail in the paper, including tests to rule out people's favorite alternative explanations.
t.co/xObtAFPZOh
Greater labor market competition has an equalizing effect across workers & helps to reduce discrimination. But so does good information about where each worker stands in his/her true productivity--when employers don't rely on coarse proxies like demographic group.
What stands out is that in the concentrated markets, the firms most likely to hire non-Western immigrants have managers who have more prior work experience with immigrants-those who know their productivity best! Another signal of *information* & beliefs being the culprit.
Second-generation immigrants don't experience the same discriminatory gaps. Neither do immigrants who have been in the country for ~20 years or immigrants from western Europe & the US.
We use the richness of the data to rule out a bunch of other mechanisms like different job search, social networks, being hired at firms with immigrant managers, take-up of social programs, or sorting into different occupations. None of these explain the gaps.
What's remarkable is that these gaps are there even when both workers are displaced from the same firm but then re-hired into the same firm! In other words, the immigrant is paid far less than his co-worker at the same company even when they were paid the same before the layoff!
By the 4th year after the layoff, gaps even in the most concentrated labor markets close, implying the discrimination is based on beliefs about the average productivity differences between immigrants & natives.
So what kind of discrimination is this? Taste-based (prejudice/animus) or based on beliefs about their productivity (like statistical discrimination)? If tastes, there's not much reason for gaps between the workers to close. But beliefs can update over time & gaps will close.
Competition STRONGLY reduces discrimination among employers, but does not quite completely eliminate it (call it win for Becker). Next we measure if this is labor market power or product market power that matters. Looks like it's loading entirely on labor market power.
We find fairly small discriminatory gaps between non-Western immigrants & other workers in competitive markets, but large gaps in concentrated (less-competitive) markets. At HHI=0.25 (~4 equally sized employers for that occupation) the immigrants earn 26% less!
We measure market competition by the concentration (HHI) of employment in the year their firm closure or mass layoff. 1=one single employer for everyone in that occupation in their city. We then track the gaps between the worker pairs as they search in a diff-in-diff setting.
Suddenly, their firm closes, & they are forced to look for a new job. Prior to the firm closing, the market valued their skills EXACTLY the same. Immigrant-native gaps after their search can tell us about discrimination--especially the difference between the two pairs.
Imagine you have four workers-2 immigrants & 2 natives working at the same firm doing the same job for the same pay. One pair (1 immigrant & 1 native) work in a city where there are lots of employers that will hire for their occupation. For the other, there are fewer employers.
Our context is Norway--long considered one of the most egalitarian societies in the world--and discrimination against immigrants from outside of 'the West.' If we can find discrimination there, it's likely to be in other places. So how do we investigate this?
iza.org/publications...
A long history of economic theory says that sufficient competition should kill discrimination, but that's been mostly focused on product market competition. We look at the role of labor market competition in allowing for discrimination.
🚨🚨 Does labor market discrimination drive economic gaps? Can market competition eliminate discrimination like economic theory suggests? What *kind* of discrimination are we talking about. In a new paper, Alex Willen & I explore the question. #Econsky
Final_Version_of_Tarrifs_actualFINALcopy_version7_USETHISONE.docx
There is a lot more in the working paper!
Human capital retention matters in strategic sectors like healthcare, so policies should reflect the balance between these priorities and public systems should be responsive to local economic conditions.
www.iza.org/publications...
So what happened in Norway? We are not able to detect any measurable effect of the incoming commuters on mortality events, physician retention, or other metrics in Norway. There appears to have been no offsetting gain in Norway.
The effects hit hardest in areas with lower physician density before the commuting started. So the out-commuting of doctors increased inequality across classes and across places within Sweden.
These illnesses are more likely to require emergency care. Guess which physicians were most likely to commute? High-skilled, young, generalists--those most likely to staff emergency departments.
The effects are driven by lower-income people who are most dependent on the public healthcare system. The same is true for education, but the gradient is less steep. The effects are mostly drive by respiratory, infection, & circulatory illnesses.
