2024-2025 International Migration Job Market Papers
In economics, graduate students going on the job market present a single job market paper (that is supposed to showcase their skills and work). I’ve gathered all1 the migration-related job market papers from the top 100 economics departments (as ranked by RePEc).2
Economists are, of course, not the only people who study migration; political scientists and sociologists do valuable work here.3 Since job market papers are relatively rare in those disciplines (and frankly, looking for every working paper written by a job market candidate in any discipline would take approx. the next year), this post only includes economists.
I’ve sorted these posts by type of migration (international/domestic4), time period (modern/historical5), and then alphabetized by country and author name within country.
I’ve tried to include as many papers as I’ve found; if I’ve missed your paper; please email me at lagilbert@gmail.com! So: let’s begin with international migration. (Domestic migration JMPs are in the next post.)
International Migration Job Market Papers
Here is a list of titles; abstracts and links are below.
Labor Market Power, Firm Productivity, and the Immigrant-Native Pay Gap
Understanding Firm Responses to Immigration Shocks
Immigrants’ skills and Capital Deepening: Evidence from Chile
Immigration Shocks and Housing Dynamics: Evidence from Bogota
Immigrants’ Return Intentions and Labor Market Behavior When the Home Country is Unsafe
The Effect of Initial Location Assignment on Healthcare Utilization of Refugees
How Restricting Migrants’ Job Options Affects Both Migrants and Existing Residents
The Cost of Waiting for Nationality: Impact on Immigrant’s Labor Market Outcomes in Spain
In the Shadow of Brothers: Unintended Impacts of a School Entry Policy on Migrant Girls
Effects of Immigrants on Non-host Regions: Evidence from the Syrian Refugees in Turkey
Student and Institutional Responses to STEM Optional Practical Training
Global Roommates, Local Outcomes: How Foreign Peers Influence Domestic Students in Higher Education
Does the “Melting Pot” Still Melt? Internet and Immigrants’ Integration
Organizational Practices and Technology Adoption: Evidence from Jewish Immigration and the Tailoring Industry in England
Immigrant Entrepreneurship in the US 1910-1940
Ethnic-Occupational Niches: Evidence from the Age of Mass Migration
Modern Day
Canada
Labor Market Power, Firm Productivity, and the Immigrant-Native Pay Gap
Stephen Tino (University of Toronto)
This paper examines the importance of labor market power and firm productivity for understanding the immigrant-native pay gap. Using matched employer-employee data from Canada, I estimate a wage-posting model that incorporates two-sided heterogeneity and strategic interactions in wage setting. In the model, firms mark down the wage below the marginal revenue product of labor (MRPL), and the equilibrium immigrant-native pay gap arises due to differences in wage markdowns and MRPL. The findings suggest that immigrants earn 77% of their MRPL on average, compared to 84% for natives. In addition, immigrants tend to work at more productive firms compared to natives, although they are less productive on average relative to natives within the same firm. To decompose the pay gap into labor supply and demand factors, I conduct counterfactual analyses that take into account general equilibrium effects. The results suggest that within-firm productivity increases the gap, while between-firm productivity decreases it. Differences in between-firm productivity are driven by immigrants sorting into cities with more productive firms, although they tend to work at less productive firms compared to natives within the same city. When all productivity heterogeneity is eliminated, the gap widens, suggesting that differences in labor supply contribute significantly to the immigrant-native pay gap.
Understanding Firm Responses to Immigration Shocks
Xiner Xu (University of Toronto)
I study the effects of immigration on the performance of local firms and their workers leveraging a sharp increase in Canada’s immigration targets in 2016. The policy led to an influx of predominantly high-skilled workers and generated unexpected variation in the growth of the foreign-born population across regions and nationalities. Motivated by the role of immigrant networks as vital channels for transmitting job information, I quantify firms’ exposure to the immigration shock using a shift-share instrument that combines these differential inflows with the ethnic and spatial composition of firms’ existing workforce. Using a novel decomposition of this measure, I draw comparisons across firms that operate within the same labor market based on differences in worker origins. Employers more exposed to the shock accelerated the hiring of recent arrivals who lacked locally accumulated human capital, increased employment and compensation for both immigrant and native workers, and experienced expansions in total output and output per worker. These results are consistent with firms benefiting from immigration through workplace ethnic networks, which may help identify workers’ productivity characteristics that are otherwise overlooked in the labor market.
Chile
Immigrants’ skills and Capital Deepening: Evidence from Chile
Alessandra Anna Palazzo (University of Maryland, College Park; with Carlos Madeira)
We study the effect of migration on firms’ capital deepening, leveraging a massive influx of immigrant workers with varying skill sets in Chile between 2015 and 2019. Using a theoretical framework that allows for differential productivity between native and immigrant workers, we estimate how firm capital responds to increases in the supply of skilled and unskilled workers. Identification relies on the shift-share instrument to estimate firms’ exposure to immigration shocks. We use unique employer-employee data to match worker characteristics, including country of origin and education level, to balance sheet data from firms’ tax returns, providing highly detailed information about the labor composition and capital in the firm that is not available in other contexts. Our findings show that a 1 p.p. increase in the proportion of skilled immigrants relative to total skilled workers in the firm raises firms’ capital per worker by 1 to 2%. The impact of skilled labor on capital deepening is nonlinear and declines as firms’ immigrant concentration increases, consistent with our model’s predictions. This nonlinear relationship is driven by the imperfect substitutability between immigrants and native workers within the same skill group.
Colombia
Immigration Shocks and Housing Dynamics: Evidence from Bogota
Daniel M. Angel (USC; with Lukas Delgado-Prieto and Juan M. Jimenez)
This paper examines the impact of immigration shocks on housing dynamics in middle-income cities. Using detailed data from Bogota at the planning unit level (UPZ), we analyze the effects of the Venezuelan diaspora on housing prices, rents, and residential construction between 2013 and 2018. Employing a shift-share instrumental variable approach, we find that the immigration shock led to a 0.07% increase in housing values and a 0.3% rise in low-cost housing construction. In contrast, rental prices remained relatively stable, likely due to regulatory constraints and the expansion of low-quality housing, which helped absorb the increased demand. Additionally, we found no evidence of native resident displacement or negative effects on native wages as a result of the immigrant influx.
Germany
Immigrants’ Return Intentions and Labor Market Behavior When the Home Country is Unsafe
Teresa Freitas-Monteiro (University of Copenhagen)
Migration is often temporary, and the intended length of stay in the host country is an important determinant of immigrants’ integration. This paper investigates whether shocks to safety conditions in the home country affect immigrants’ return intentions and labor market behavior. We combine administrative and survey data with precise information on violent events worldwide and exploit the quasi-random occurrence of violent events in the home country relative to the timing of interviews and job separations in Germany. We show that immigrants interviewed after a violent event in their home country are 12 percentage points more likely to wish to remain in Germany permanently. The effects are stronger if immigrants are less integrated in Germany and have close family members in their home country. Consistent with the prediction that revisions to the intended length of stay affect immigrants’ labor market behavior, we show that immigrants who enter unemployment when a violent event hits their home country increase their job search effort and find employment faster. However, the same immigrants trade immediate job security for lower earnings, less stable jobs and less productive firms.
Netherlands
The Effect of Initial Location Assignment on Healthcare Utilization of Refugees
Shobhit Kulshreshtha (Tilburg University)
Characteristics of a place, such as healthcare access and the local environment, influence healthcare utilization. Refugees resettled in developed countries are often assigned locations based on the host country’s assignment policies, yet the impact of initial placement on their healthcare usage remains understudied. I use Dutch administrative data to examine the effect of conditions in the initial municipality on healthcare utilization of refugees, leveraging the random assignment of refugees. I show that 10% of the total variation in hospital visits among refugees can be explained by municipality effects. Additionally, being assigned to a municipality with a higher hospital visit rate among non-refugees increases a refugee’s probability of hospital visits. There is significant heterogeneity in the results for other measures, such as depression medication use and general practitioner costs. This study highlights the role of local healthcare access in shaping healthcare usage among refugees, contributing to policy debates aiming to provide separate and more targeted healthcare services for this vulnerable population at the municipality level.
New Zealand
How Restricting Migrants’ Job Options Affects Both Migrants and Existing Residents
Wilbur Townsend (Harvard; with Corey Allan)
Governments often restrict international migrants’ job options. This paper shows that these restrictions can hurt not only migrants but also the existing residents whom they aim to protect. We study New Zealand’s ‘Essential Skills’ work visa, which was New Zealand’s main work visa between 2008 and 2022. Essential Skills migrants could only work for firms which could not find New Zealanders. Loosening restrictions for a single individual has no impact on their wages: migrants who win an unrestricted resident visa through a lottery switch jobs more frequently, but receive no gain in wages. However, when the Essential Skills job restrictions were loosened for all migrants in an occupation, both job-switching and wages typically grew. These results are consistent with a wage-posting model in which each firm pays migrants and residents equally; in such a model, the wage received by each worker will not depend directly on her own outside option but rather on the distribution of outside options among her colleagues. We estimate a wage-posting model, and compare equilibrium wages under the Essential Skills job restrictions to a counterfactual simulation in which migrants’ job options are unrestricted. The restrictions decreased migrants’ average wage by 8%. Although most residents were unaffected by the restrictions, 2.1% had their wage decreased by more than 2%. The restrictions increased profits, especially in firms which employed many migrants. The restrictions decreased annual welfare by $292m NZD — 30% of migrants’ earnings — largely because migrants could not move to firms which they preferred for non-pecuniary reasons.
Spain
The Cost of Waiting for Nationality: Impact on Immigrant’s Labor Market Outcomes in Spain
Yanina Domenella (CEMFI)
In this paper, I examine the impact of administrative delays in obtaining Spanish nationality on the long-term labor market outcomes of legal immigrants. Using Social Security data from 2006 to 2019 and an instrumental variable strategy, I find that longer delays in nationality acquisition result in significantly lower accumulated earnings over a ten-year period, driven by both lower wages and fewer days worked. Specifically, one additional year of delay reduces accumulated earnings over 10 years by 3.8 to 6.7 percent. To understand the underlying mechanisms, I study the short-term effects of nationality acquisition on job mobility and job quality. The results suggest that delays prolong the period of restricted mobility, hindering access to better employment opportunities. After obtaining the nationality, immigrants can afford a more selective and longer job search that pays off in the long run. These findings underscore the importance of timely nationality acquisition for improving economic outcomes and highlight the need for efficient administrative processes to support immigrant integration.
Sweden
In the Shadow of Brothers: Unintended Impacts of a School Entry Policy on Migrant Girls
Anna Hasselqvist (LMU Munich)
When parents prioritize investments in sons over daughters, this gender bias can render otherwise beneficial educational policies ineffective for girls or even lead to unintended negative consequences. This study examines how Sweden's school entry policy interacts with family structure to shape the educational outcomes of second-generation migrant girls. Using a regression discontinuity design on high-quality administrative data, I first assess the direct effects of late school entry, showing that it benefits migrant girls with younger sisters but not those with younger brothers. Furthermore, by investigating sibling spillover effects from an older sibling's late school entry, I demonstrate that spending more time at home with an older brother who enters school late has a strong negative effect on the educational outcomes of younger sisters. I propose a simple theory to explain these results, highlighting gender bias in parental preferences as a key factor. Supporting this interpretation, I present evidence showing that these negative impacts are specific to migrant girls, with neither migrant boys nor native children experiencing similar effects. Moreover, the effects are more pronounced in migrant families with traditional backgrounds and are also reflected in mothers' labor supply decisions when sons, rather than daughters, enter school late.
Turkey
Effects of Immigrants on Non-host Regions: Evidence from the Syrian Refugees in Turkey
Ahmet Gulek (MIT; with Tishara Garg)
This paper investigates how immigration-induced wage shocks can propagate beyond the regions receiving immigrants through the production network. Using the Syrian refugee crisis in Turkey as a quasi-experiment and the near universe of domestic firm-to-firm transaction data from VAT records, we show that the immigration shock propagates both forward and backward along the supply chain. Firms in non-host regions who directly or indirectly buy from host regions demand more labor. Firms who sell to host regions weakly increase their sales. Estimates imply an elasticity of substitution between labor and intermediate goods of 0.76 and an elasticity of substitution of nearly 1 between intermediates. Counterfactual analyses show that the spillover effects on non-host regions are economically meaningful when the host regions are central nodes of the domestic trade network. For example, a 1% increase in labor supply in Istanbul decreases real wages in Istanbul by 0.56% and increases real wages in the average non-host city by 0.38%.
US
Student and Institutional Responses to STEM Optional Practical Training
Kamal Bookwala (University of California Irvine)
The United States is a globally popular location for going to college. In fact, almost 350,000 international students were working towards their bachelors degree in the United States in the 2023-2024 academic year. In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security introduced an extension to the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which allows international students to work in the US after earning a higher education degree. This extension applies to any international student who receives a degree in a STEM field from a United States higher education institution. STEM students are now able to seamlessly work in the US for an additional 24 months (above the standard non-STEM 12-months). This paper examines the effects of the OPT extensions using the College and Beyond II dataset, supplemented with some University of California-Irvine administrative data. I primarily employ a cohort-based difference in difference approach to explore the relationship between the OPT policy change and undergraduate students’ course and degree choices. I also track institution-level responses to the policy changes. My main finding is an increase in enrollment in STEM majors after the OPT extension for international as well as domestic students. Additional findings show that after the extensions, institutions with higher international student proportions have greater STEM cohort sizes for domestic students. Supply-side impacts of these policies are that new majors are more often STEM and maximum seat allotment for STEM courses increases after the OPT extensions. Results from this research shed light on how the OPT extension has impacted students and institutions and identify the effectiveness of OPT extension policies.
Global Roommates, Local Outcomes: How Foreign Peers Influence Domestic Students in Higher Education
Zeyu Li (University of California Irvine)
This paper investigates the causal impact of foreign roommates on the academic outcomes of domestic students at a large U.S. public university. Leveraging quasi-random roommate assignment, I estimate the effects of living with foreign peers on major choices and academic performance, with a particular focus on STEM participation. The results show that male students assigned foreign roommates are 3.5 percentage points more likely to pursue a STEM major and to graduate in STEM fields, while no significant effect is found for female students. The positive effect for male students is primarily observed among those who initially declared STEM majors. Further analysis reveals that domestic students from areas with higher proportions of foreign-born residents are more responsive to the influence of foreign roommates, suggesting that prior exposure to diversity is associated with a greater likelihood of being influenced by peer effects in college. GPA and overall graduation rates show minimal impacts, though male students benefit from a reduced time to graduation. The effect is likely through affecting students’ perceptions of their abilities relative to their higher-achieving foreign peers, especially in STEM. These findings contribute to the literature on peer effects and gender disparities in education, highlighting the broader role of diversity in shaping academic trajectories in higher education.
Does the “Melting Pot” Still Melt? Internet and Immigrants’ Integration
Alexander Yarkin (Brown University)
The global spread of the Internet and the rising salience of immigration are two of the biggest trends of the last decades. And yet, the effects of new digital technologies on immigrants - their social integration, spatial segregation, and economic outcomes- remain unknown. This paper addresses this gap: it shows how home-country Internet expansion affects immigrants’ socio-economic integration in the US. Using DID and event-study methods, I find that home-country Internet expansion lowers immigrants’ linguistic proficiency, naturalization rates, and economic integration. The effect is driven by younger and less educated immigrants. However, home-country Internet also decreases spatial and occupational segregation, and increases subjective well-being of immigrants. The time use data suggests that the Internet changing immigrants’ networking is part of the story. I also show the role of return intentions and Facebook usage, among other factors. These findings align with a Roy model of migration, augmented with a choice between host- vs. home-country ties. Overall, this paper shows how digital technologies transform the immigration, diversity, and social cohesion nexus.
Historical Papers
UK
Yannis Kastis (University College London; with Hillary Vipond)
This paper provides causal evidence on the role of organizational practices in driving technology adoption. We examine a shift in practices in the English tailoring industry, prompted by the arrival of Jewish immigrant tailors who fled pogroms in the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1905. By the time Jewish tailors arrived in England, garment production was predominantly bespoke and native tailors were using sewing machines - introduced in the 1860s - to increase individual productivity. In Russia, where sewing machines were unavailable, Jewish tailors specialized in ready-to-wear production, which involved a greater division of labor into specialized tasks than bespoke work. Upon arriving in England, they combined the available sewing machines with their organizational practice to scale up ready-to-wear production. Using original data on production tasks and firm-level data, we study how this shift influenced the adoption of the sewing machine and the transition to mass production of garments in England. Our findings show that organizational practices are instrumental in integrating new technologies into production.
US
Immigrant Entrepreneurship in the US 1910-1940
Zhen Gu (University of Arizona)
I study immigrant entrepreneurship in the early twentieth century. Using the full count US Censuses, I document the widening gap between immigrants and native whites in self-employment from 1910 to 1940. Immigrants from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe were most entrepreneurial. The tightening immigration restrictions and a series of economic and political events changed the demographics of immigrants staying in the US, which contributed to the higher business ownership rate of immigrants. I propose two factors to explain the remaining immigrant-native difference in self-employment. The pull factor are expanding ethnic enclaves that create markets for ethnic goods, increase labor supply for immigrant business owners, and build up social connection among immigrant entrepreneurs. The push factor is the deterioration of job opportunities in the wage sector of labor market which forces immigrants into self-employment for survival. I find higher wage expectation decreased the probability of immigrant being self-employed while a larger immigrant community size at city level was positively correlated with self-employment. I also show self-employed immigrants and native whites had different preferences for industries. Immigrants tended to concentrate in industries that required less education and financial investment, suggesting immigrants in the period of study used self-employment more as a survival strategy.
Ethnic-Occupational Niches: Evidence from the Age of Mass Migration
Elijah Locke (Boston University)
Why are some ethnic or immigrant groups vastly over-represented in certain occupations? This paper analyzes the drivers of such ethnic-occupational niches by turning to the United States during the Age of Mass Migration. I posit that niches begin due to immigrants' pre-migration skills, and persist via social networks. Between 1850 and 1940, I find that 46% of all immigrants were in niches. Immigrants niched in occupations ranging from tailors to managers and bakers, and the degree of their over-representation varied widely across nationality, time, and occupation. In an occupational choice framework, a skill background alone may generate a niche, but social networks have critical implications for misallocation and intergenerational mobility. Finally, I estimate the precise impact of social networks on occupational choice. A one-unit increase in the clustering of one’s incumbent co-ethnics in a niched occupation corresponds to a 7.3% increase in the likelihood a newcomer chooses that occupation. Immigrants with the least information about labor markets are especially reliant on their networks. A novel IV setup leveraging newly digitized data points to minimal OLS bias. Altogether, my findings are in line with those regarding contemporary immigrant networks, thereby reaffirming the connection between niches past and present.
Or, at least, all of them that were linked from the department’s job market candidate list (not all departments had such a list) and had a PDF version of the paper available.
Yes, this is shamelessly modeled after Matt Clancy’s innovation JMP roundups.
I am, after all, a political scientist.
In general, this living lit review focuses on international migration rather than internal migration. But many of the internal migration papers are cool, and also I like to promote grad student work.
To a first order, I’ve defined a paper as historical if no data from later than 1990 is used in the paper.