We study how migration decisions of Mexican households respond to unemployment shocks in the U.S. We emphasize the role played by households (as opposed to individuals) as the decision-making units at origin. We show that Mexican families with members working abroad (exposed families) respond to negative economic shocks in the U.S. in a heterogeneous fashion. Poor families react by sending addi...

The People’s Republic of China conducted its fifth population census in November 2000. This paper draws from that census and recent data to examine national and regional demographic changes in China over the past two decades. Nationally, the impact of fertility decline on rates of population growth, age composition, and household size is investigated. Regional population trends include the risi...

In this paper, I study the impact of the Hukou labor mobility restrictions on human capital investment in China. Rural people have stronger incentive to pursue higher education, treating it as means to obtain urban identity and escape from underdeveloped areas. The 1998 Hukou policy reform granted urban Hukou to a specific group automaticly. Using a Regression Discontinuity strategy to fully ex...

Random or Referral Hiring: When Social Connections Matter This study investigates the existence of hiring criteria associated with the degree of social connections between skill and low-skill workers. We provide evidence about to what extent managers rely on their social connections in recruiting low-skill workers rather than on random matching. As one unique feature we follow an approach for a...

This paper looks at the link between inter-regional mobility, innovation and firms’ behavioural heterogeneity in their reliance on localised external sources of knowledge. By linking patent data (capturing inventors’ inter-regional mobility) with firm-level data (providing information on firms’ innovation inputs and behaviour) a robust identification strategy makes it possible to shed new light...

Low-Skilled Immigration and Parenting Investments of College-Educated Mothers in the United States: Evidence from Time-Use Data This paper uses several decades of US time-diary surveys to assess the impact of low-skilled immigration, through lower prices for commercial child care, on parental time investments. Using an instrumental variables approach that accounts for the endogenous location of...

Experimental Approaches in Migration Studies The decision of whether or not to migrate has far-reaching consequences for the lives of individuals and their families. But the very nature of this choice makes identifying the impacts of migration difficult, since it is hard to measure a credible counterfactual of what the person and their household would have been doing had migration not occurred....

This study explores the importance of tacit knowledge transfer for international technology di¤usion by examining ethnic scienti…c communities in the US and their ties to their home countries. US ethnic research communities are quanti…ed by applying an ethnic-name database to individual patent records. International patent citations con…rm knowledge di¤uses through ethnic networks, and manufact...

Immigration and the Neighborhood What impact does immigration have on neighborhood dynamics? Within metropolitan areas, we find that housing values have grown relatively more slowly in neighborhoods of immigrant settlement. We propose three nonexclusive explanations: changes in housing quality, reverse causality, or the hypothesis that natives find immigrant neighbors relatively less attractive...

Does Immigration Affect Wages? A Look at Occupation-Level Evidence Previous research has reached mixed conclusions about the effect of higher levels of immigration on the wages of natives. This paper reexamines this question using data from the Current Population Survey and the Immigration and Naturalization Service and focuses on differential effects by skill level. Using occupation as a proxy...