The Labor Market Effects of a Refugee Wave: Synthetic Control Method meets the Mariel Boatlift∗

We apply the synthetic control method to re-examine the wage and employment effect of the Mariel Boatlift, a large inflow of Cuban refugees to Miami in 1980. This method improves on previous studies by choosing a control group for Miami so as to best match its labor market features in the eight years before the Boatlift. Given the presence of significant measurement error for average city wages we emphasize the importance of using the May-ORG CPS sample rather than the March-CPS. The first includes a more reliable measure of weekly wages, has larger sample size and ∗We thank David Card, Colin Cameron, Thomas Lemieux, David Green, Michael Clemens, Pat Kline, Doug Miller, Joan Monras, Enrico Moretti, David Roodman, Shu Shen and participants in seminars at NBER winter meetings, University of British Columbia and Georgetown University for useful comments. We are grateful for the criticism contained in Borjas (2015b) to the first draft of this paper, as it has helped our current revision. We have not received any financial support for this paper. †Giovanni Peri: Department of Economics, UC Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis CA, 95616; email: [email protected]. ‡Vasil Yasenov: Department of Economics, UC Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis CA, 95616; email: [email protected].