Measuring the economic impact of coworkers from different countries of origin sparked intense scrutiny in labor economics, albeit with an uncomfortable methodological limitation. Most attempts involved metrics that eliminate most of the economically relevant distances among different countries...

We use recent immigration data from 195 countries and propose an index of population diversity based on people's birthplaces. This new index is then decomposed into a size (share of foreign born) and a variety (diversity of immigrants) component and is available for 1990 and 2000 disaggregated...