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...

The national origin of an individual's human capital is a crucial determinant of its value. Education acquired abroad is significantly less valued than education obtained domestically. This difference can fully explain the earnings disadvantage of immigrants relative to comparable natives in...

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...

Natives benefit from immigration mainly because of production complementarities between immigrant workers and other factors of production, and these benefits are larger when immigrants are sufficiently `different' from the stock of native productive inputs. The available evidence suggests that...

The wage impact of immigration depends crucially on the elasticity of substitution between similarly skilled immigrants and natives and the elasticity of substitution between high school dropouts and graduates. This paper revisits the estimation of these elasticities. The U.S. data indicate that...

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...

Cardʼs (1990) study of the Mariel supply shock is an important contribution to the literature that measures the labor market impact of immigration. My recent reappraisal (Borjas, 2015) revealed that even the most cursory reexamination implied that the wage of low-skill (non-Hispanic) working...

Employment rates in the United States fell dramatically between February 2020 and April 2020 as the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic reverberated through the labor market. This paper uses data from the CPS Basic Monthly Files to document that the employment decline was particularly severe...