IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/71.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Immigration and the Real Wage: Time Series Evidence from the United States, 1820-1977

Author

Listed:
  • Geary, Patrick T.
  • O'Gráda, Cormac

Abstract

How migration affects economic welfare in sending and receiving countries is an important issue. This paper deals mainly with one aspect, the relation between immigration and the real wage in the host country. Theory is ambivalent on the outcome. While it is plausible to see immigration depressing the real wage consequent on increased labour supply, consideration of scale economies and migrant selection bias argue for a rise, at least in the medium term. The hypothesis that immigration affects the real wage implies that the former "precedes" or "leads" the latter. This can be expressed in terms of the Granger-causal ordering of the series. We present bivariate and trivariate evidence on the ordering for United States immigration 1820-1977, and find that Granger-causality runs mainly from immigration to real wages, and not the reverse. Similar analysis of the relationship between immigration and GNP produced weak and inconclusive results. Investigation of the direction and magnitude of the immigration-real wage effect shows that it is negative, but modest.

Suggested Citation

  • Geary, Patrick T. & O'Gráda, Cormac, 1985. "Immigration and the Real Wage: Time Series Evidence from the United States, 1820-1977," CEPR Discussion Papers 71, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:71
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=71
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Labour Economics; Migration;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:71. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.