Although a sizable fraction of the Puerto Rican-born population moved to the United States, the island also received large inflows of persons born outside Puerto Rico. Hence Puerto Rico provides a unique setting for examining how labor inflows and outflows coexist, and measuring the mirror-image...

This paper documents the extent to which immigrants participate in the many programs that make up the welfare state. The immigrant- native difference in the probability of receiving cash benefits is small, but the gap widens once other programs are included in the analysis: 21 percent of...

Many economists believe knowledge production generates positive spillovers among knowledge producers. The available evidence, however, is mixed. We argue that spillovers can exist along three dimensions (idea, geographic, and collaboration space). To isolate the key channel through which...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of immigrant participation in the welfare system using the 1970 and 1980 U.S. Censuses. The availability of two cross-sections allows for identification of cohort and assimilation effects. The data indicate that recent immigrant cohorts use the welfare...

This paper studies long-term trends in the labor market performance of immigrants in the United States, using the 1960-2000 PUMS and 1994-2009 CPS. While there was a continuous decline in the earnings of new immigrants 1960-1990, the trend reversed in the 1990s, with newcomers doing as well in...

Over 12 million persons migrated to Canada or the United States between 1959 and 1981. Beginning in the mid?1960s, the immigration policies of the two countries began to diverge considerably: the United States stressing family reunification and Canada stressing skills. This paper shows that the...

Although economic theory predicts an inverse relation between relative wages and immigration-induced supply shifts, it has been difficult to document such effects. The weak evidence may be partly due to sampling error in a commonly used measure of the supply shift, the immigrant share of the...

Knowledge producers conducting research on a particular set of questions may respond to supply and demand shocks by shifting resources to a different set of questions. Cognitive mobility measures the transition from one location to another in idea space. We examine the cognitive mobility flows...

It has been difficult to open up the black box of knowledge production. We use unique international data on the publications, citations, and affiliations of mathematicians to examine the impact of a large post-1992 influx of Soviet mathematicians on the productivity of their American...

This paper brings a new perspective to the analysis of the Mariel supply shock, revisiting the question armed with the accumulated insights from the literature on the economic impact of immigration. A crucial lesson from that literature is that any credible attempt to measure the wage impact...