The impact of immigration on the labour market: Evidence from 20 years of cross-border migration to Argentina

Battiston, Diego (2013): The impact of immigration on the labour market: Evidence from 20 years of cross-border migration to Argentina.

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of immigration on the wages of Argentinean native workers over the period 1993-2012. I use a novel micro-dataset which combines household surveys from Argentina and six other Latin American countries. Immigration from these six countries accounts for 95% of the total immigration from Latin American countries. The empirical strategy identifies the effects of the labour supply variation using the “national approach” from Borjas (2003) and a reduced form equation obtained within a CES framework. In order to account for demand/pull shocks, I propose a set of instruments based on labour market conditions in immigrants’ home countries. An alternative specification also explores the hypothesis of heterogeneous impact by country of origin. Overall, findings show a significant negative impact of immigration on wages. IV estimates suggest that OLS results are a lower bound for the (partial) causal effect. Thus, if confounding demand factors exist, they bias the results toward zero.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: immigration; wages; Argentina; labour market; cross-border migration
• Subjects: J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J0 - General; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J2 - Demand and Supply of Labor > J20 - General; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J3 - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs > J31 - Wage Level and Structure ; Wage Differentials; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers > J61 - Geographic Labor Mobility ; Immigrant Workers; O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth > O5 - Economywide Country Studies > O54 - Latin America ; Caribbean

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