The Economic Impacts of Immigration: A Look at the Housing Market Honors Senior Thesis

This paper uses data from the 1990 and 2000 Decennial Censuses to study the impacts of immigration on local housing markets. Specifically, I use matched tract-level data from the two Censuses to study the effects of changes in the number of immigrants on rental prices in a tract. Without other controls, the results indicate that tracts with larger inflows of immigrants between 1990 and 2000 had slower rental price growth, with evidence of differential impacts for Hispanic and non-Hispanic immigrants. However, once controls are added for the changing socioeconomic composition of tracts, the direct effects of immigrants fall in magnitude and become economically and statistically insignificant. These findings are consistent with previous research which argues that immigrants’ effects on the local housing market have to do more with their socioeconomic characteristics than with the fact that they are immigrants. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Professor Card for all his guidance and support throughout these past few years. I would also like to thank my friend Monica Deza for her advice and help with STATA. I would not have been able to do any of this without their help, patience and encouragement. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support from the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, the Pergo Foundation, and the McNair Scholar Program.