TY  - JOUR
AU  - Davis,Donald R.
AU  - Weinstein,David E.
TI  - Technological Superiority and the Losses from Migration
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8971
PY  - 2002
Y2  - May 2002
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8971
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8971.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Donald R. Davis
Columbia University, Department of Economics
1038 Intl. Affairs Building
420 West 118th St.
New York, NY 10027
Tel: 212/854-4037
Fax: 212/854-8059
E-Mail: drd28@columbia.edu

David Weinstein
Columbia University, Department of Economics
420 W. 118th Street
MC 3308
New York, NY  10027
Tel: 212/854-6880
Fax: 212/854-8059
E-Mail: dew35@columbia.edu
AB  - Two facts motivate this study. (1) The United States is the world's most productive economy. (2) The US is the destination for a broad range of net factor inflows: unskilled labor, skilled labor, and capital. Indeed, these two facts may be strongly related: All factors seek to enter the US because of the US technological superiority. The literature on international factor flows rarely links these two phenomena, instead considering one-at-a-time analyses that stress issues of relative factor abundance. This is unfortunate, since the welfare calculations differ markedly. In a simple Ricardian framework, a country that experiences immigration of factors motivated by technological differences always loses from this migration relative to a free trade baseline, while the other country gains. We provide simple calculations suggesting that the magnitude of the losses for US natives may be quite large   $72 billion dollars per year or 0.8 percent of GDP.
ER  -