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Immigration and Wage Dynamics: Evidence from the Mexican Peso Crisis

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  • Joan Monras

    (ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

How does the US labor market absorb low-skilled immigration? I address this question using the 1995 Mexican Peso Crisis, an exogenous push factor that raised Mexican migration to the US. In the short run, high-immigration states see their low-skilled labor force increase and native low-skilled wages decrease, with an implied local labor demand elasticity of -.7. Internal relocation dissipates this shock spatially. In the long run, the only lasting consequences are for low-skilled natives who entered the labor force in high-immigration years. A simple quantitative many-region model allows me to obtain the counterfactual local wage evolution absent the immigration shock.

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  • Joan Monras, 2015. "Immigration and Wage Dynamics: Evidence from the Mexican Peso Crisis," Working Papers hal-01127022, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-01127022
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Local shocks; International and internal migration; Local labor demand elasticity;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F22 - International Economics - - International Factor Movements and International Business - - - International Migration
    • J20 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - General
    • J30 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - General

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