This paper uses census and survey data to identify the wage earning ability and the selection of recent Romanian migrants and returnees. We construct measures of selection across skill groups and estimate the average and the skill-specific premium for migration and return for three typical...

I show that a CES production-function-based approach with skill differentiation and integrated national labor markets has predictions for the employment effect of immigrants at the local level. The model predicts that if I look at the employment (rather than wage) response by skill to...

A series of recent influential papers has emphasized that in order to identify the wage effects of immigration one needs to consider national effects by skill level. The criticism to the so called ʺarea approachʺ is based on the fact that native workers are mobile and would eliminate, in the...

As of 2004 California employed almost 30% of all foreign born workers in the U.S. and was the state with the largest percentage of immigrants in the labor force. It also received a very large number of Mexican and uneducated immigrants during the recent decades. If immigration harms the labor...

This paper asks the following important question: what was the effect of surging immigration on average and individual wages of U.S.-born workers during the period 1990-2004? Building on section VII of Borjas (2003) we emphasize the need for a general equilibrium approach to analyze this...