NBER Publications by Chad Sparber

There is a long-standing debate among academics about the effect of immigration on native internal migration decisions. If immigrants displace natives this may indicate a direct cost of immigration in the form of decreased employment opportunity for native workers. Moreover, displacement would also imply that cross-region analyses of wage effects systematically underestimate the consequences of immigration. The widespread use of such area studies for the US and other countries makes it especially important to know whether a native internal response to immigration truly occurs. This paper introduces a microsimulation methodology to test for inherent bias in regression models that have been used in the literature. We show that some specifications have built biases into their models, thereby ...

Many workers with low levels of educational attainment immigrated to the United States in recent decades. Large inflows of less-educated immigrants would reduce wages paid to comparably-educated native-born workers if the two groups compete for similar jobs. In a simple model exploiting comparative advantage, however, we show that if less-educated foreign and native-born workers specialize in performing complementary tasks, immigration will cause natives to reallocate their task supply, thereby reducing downward wage pressure. Using individual data on the task intensity of occupations across US states from 1960-2000, we then demonstrate that foreign-born workers specialize in occupations that require manual tasks such as cleaning, cooking, and building. Immigration causes natives -- who ha...