In the 1980s, the wages and employment rates of less-skilled Americans fell relative to those of more-skilled workers. This paper examines the contribution of the continuing inflow of less-skilled immigrants and the increasing importance of imports in the U.S. economy to these trends. Our...

The postwar period witnessed major changes in U.S. immigration policy and in economic and political conditions in many of the source countries. As a result, the size, origin, and skill composition of immigrant flows changed substantially. This paper uses the Public Use Samples of the five...

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical study of how immigration influences the joint determination of the wage structure and internal migration behavior for native-born workers in local labor markets. Using data from the 1960-2000 decennial censuses, the study shows that immigration is...

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...

Immigration is not evenly balanced across groups of workers that have the same education but differ in their work experience, and the nature of the supply imbalance changes over time. This paper develops a new approach for estimating the labor market impact of immigration by exploiting this...

The theory of factor demand has important implications for the study of the impact of immigration on wages. This paper derives the theoretical implications in the context of a general equilibrium model where the wage impact depends on the elasticity of product demand, the rate at which the...

Increased use of robots has roused concern about how robots and other new technologies change the world of work. Using numbers of robots shipped to primarily manufacturing industries as a supply shock to an industry labor market, we estimate that an additional robot reduces employment and wages...

Immigration is sometimes claimed to be a key contributor to economic growth. Few academic studies, however, examine the direct link between immigration and growth. And the evidence on the outcomes that the literature does examine (such as the impact on wages or government receipts and...

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...