Do Special Interest Groups Affect Immigration?
While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration policy, there is no systematic empirical analysis of this issue. In this paper, we construct an industry-level dataset for the United States, by combining information on the number of temporary work visas with data on lobbying activity associated with immigration. We find robust evidence that both pro- and anti-immigration interest groups play a statistically significant and economically relevant role in shaping migration across sectors. Barriers to migration are lower in sectors in which business interest groups incur larger lobby expenditures and higher in sectors where labor unions are more important.
Trade Liberalization and Wage Inequality: Evidence from India
We evaluate empirically the impact of the dramatic 1991 trade liberalization in India on the industry wage structure. The empirical strategy uses variation in industry wage premiums and trade policy across industries and over time. In contrast to most earlier studies on developing countries, we find a strong, negative, and robust relationship between changes in trade policy and changes in industry wage premiums over time. The results are consistent with liberalization-induced productivity increases at the firm level, which get passed on to industry wages. We also find that trade liberalization has led to decreased wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers in India. This is consistent with the magnitude of tariff reductions being relatively larger in sectors with a higher proportion of unskilled workers.
Emigration and Wages in Source Countries: Evidence from Mexico
This paper presents the first econometric study of the effect of emigration on national wages in a source country. I examine empirically the effect of Mexican emigration to the United States on wages in Mexico using data from the Mexican and US censuses from 1970-2000. The main result in the paper is that emigration has a strong and positive effect on Mexican wages. There is also evidence for increasing wage inequality in Mexico due to emigration. Simple welfare calculations based on a labor demand-supply framework suggest that the aggregate welfare loss to Mexico due to emigration is small. However, there is a significant distributional impact between labor and other factors.
Emigration and Brain-Drain: Evidence from the Caribbean
This paper quantifies the magnitude and nature of migration flows from the Caribbean and estimates their costs and benefits. The Caribbean countries have lost 10?40 percent of their labor force due to emigration to OECD member countries. The migration rates are particularly striking for the high-skilled. Many countries have lost more than 70 percent of their labor force with more than 12 years of completed schooling?among the highest emigration rates in the world. The region is also the world?s largest recipient of remittances as a percent of GDP. Remittances constituted about 13 percent of the region’s GDP in 2002. Simple welfare calculations (under very conservative assumptions of elasticities) suggest that the losses due to high-skill migration (ceteris paribus) outweigh the official remittances to the Caribbean region.