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The impact of immigration on the labour market: Evidence from 20 years of cross-border migration to Argentina

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  • Battiston, Diego

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of immigration on the wages of Argentinean native workers over the period 1993-2012. I use a novel micro-dataset which combines household surveys from Argentina and six other Latin American countries. Immigration from these six countries accounts for 95% of the total immigration from Latin American countries. The empirical strategy identifies the effects of the labour supply variation using the “national approach” from Borjas (2003) and a reduced form equation obtained within a CES framework. In order to account for demand/pull shocks, I propose a set of instruments based on labour market conditions in immigrants’ home countries. An alternative specification also explores the hypothesis of heterogeneous impact by country of origin. Overall, findings show a significant negative impact of immigration on wages. IV estimates suggest that OLS results are a lower bound for the (partial) causal effect. Thus, if confounding demand factors exist, they bias the results toward zero.

Suggested Citation

  • Battiston, Diego, 2013. "The impact of immigration on the labour market: Evidence from 20 years of cross-border migration to Argentina," MPRA Paper 52424, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:52424
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    immigration; wages; Argentina; labour market; cross-border migration;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J0 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General
    • J20 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - General
    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
    • O54 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Latin America; Caribbean

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