George J Borjas
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 253548 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | George J Borjas |
| NOMBRES | George J |
| APELLIDO | Borjas |
| FIRMA | BORJAS G J |
| AFILIACIONES | National Bureau of Economic Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8596-1705 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 93 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 984 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 92 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1980 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 18 |
Gender, Selection into Employment, and the Wage Impact of Immigration
Natives are expected to respond to the wage impact of immigration by moving across markets. We argue that the observed impact depends not only on the size of the native response but also on which natives choose to respond. Specifically, a nonrandom response produces a selection bias. We document its empirical relevance by showing that the strong feminization of the French immigrant workforce reduced the employment of native women, leading to siza…
Monopsony, Efficiency, and the Regularization of Undocumented Immigrants
Foundational Essays in Immigration Economics
"This book collects the main papers written by George Borjas on the economics of immigration during a decades-long career. Although there was little interest in immigration issues among economists before the 1980s, the literature has exploded since. The essays collected in this book represent some of the contributions that helped build the foundations of immigration economics. The essays cover a wide range of topics, including the assimilation of…
Who Leaves? The Outmigration of the Foreign-Born
This paper analyzes the return migration of foreign-born persons in the United States. We argue that return migration may have been planned as part of an optimal life-cycle residential location sequence. Return migration also occurs because immigrants based their initial migration decision on erroneous information about opportunities in the United States. The study uses the 1980 Census and administrative data from the Immigration and Naturalizati…
Ethnicity, Neighborhoods, and Human-Capital Externalities
The socioeconomic performance of today’s workers depends not only on parental skills, but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parents’ generation (or ethnic capita/). This paper investigates the link between the ethnic externality and ethnic neighborhoods. The evidence indicates that residential segregation and the external effect of ethnicity are linked, partly because ethnic capital summarizes the socioeconomic background of t…
Gender, Selection into Employment, and the Wage Impact of Immigration
Gender, Selection into Employment, and the Wage Impact of Immigration
Ethnicity, Neighborhoods, and Human-Capital Externalities
The socioeconomic performance of today's workers depends not only on parental skills, but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the generation of their parents (or ethnic capital). This chapter investigates the link between the ethnic externality and ethnic neighborhoods. The evidence indicates that residential segregation and the external effect of ethnicity are linked, partly because ethnic capital summarizes the socioeconomic backg…
Foundations of Migration Economics
Migration these days is as topical as ever. A substantial and even increasing percentage of the world population live outside their country of birth. Climate change, conflicts, but also better education in developing countries will lead to more international migration, and will present new challenges to the societies in the sending and receiving countries. This volume offers insights into core topics of migration economics that have been pioneere…
From Immigrants to Robots
Using numbers of industrial robots shipped to primarily manufacturing industries as a supply shock to an industry labor market, we estimate that an additional robot reduces employment by roughly two to three workers overall and by three to four workers when robots are likely to be good substitutes for humans. The supply shock also reduces wages. The estimates far exceed those of an additional immigrant on employment and wages. While growth of rob…
Self-selection of Emigrants
The Roy model has more precise predictions about the self-selection of migrants than previously realised. The conditions shown to result in positive or negative selection in terms of expected earnings also imply a stochastic dominance relationship between the earnings distributions of migrants and non-migrants. We test these predictions using the Danish full population administrative data. We find strong evidence of positive self-selection of emi…
The Wage Impact of the Marielitos
The author's 2017 reappraisal of the impact of the Mariel supply shock revealed that the wage of low-skill workers declined in post-Mariel Miami. Clemens and Hunt (2019) assert that a data quirk in the March CPS-specifically, a substantial increase in the black share of Miami's low-skill workforce in the period-implies that those wage trends do not correctly measure the impact of the Marielitos. Because blacks earn less than whites earn, the incr…
The Economics of Immigration
The early work of Gilles Grenier, and Walter McManus, William Gould, and Finis Welch concluded that US immigrants who are proficient in the English language have higher earnings than immigrants who are not. In view of the post-1950 changes in the national origin mix of immigrant flows, it is not surprising that these changes “explain” the decline in relative wages across successive immigrant waves. The chapter explains the skill decline into a po…
The labor supply of undocumented immigrants
The labour market consequences of refugee supply shocks
The continuing inflow of hundreds of thousands of refugees into many European countries has ignited much political controversy and raised questions that require a fuller understanding of the determinants and consequences of refugee supply shocks. This paper revisits four historical refugee shocks to document their labour market impact. Specifically, we examine: The influx of Marielitos into Miami in 1980; the influx of French repatriates and Alge…
The Wage Impact of the Marielitos
This article brings a new perspective to the analysis of the wage effects of the Mariel boatlift crisis, in which an estimated 125,000 Cuban refugees migrated to Florida between April and October, 1980. The author revisits the question of wage impacts from such a supply shock, drawing on the cumulative insights of research on the economic impact of immigration. That literature shows that the wage impact must be measured by carefully matching the …
The Wage Impact of the Marielitos
Card s (1990) study of the Mariel supply shock is an important contribution to the literature that measures the labor market impact of immigration. My recent reappraisal In the three months since the public release of my paper, there has already been one "re-reappraisal" of the evidence. Peri and Yasenov (2015) make a number of alternative methodological choices that lead them to conclude that Mariel did not have a wage impact. This paper isolate…
Migration, Economics of
The Slowdown in the Economic Assimilation of Immigrants
This paper examines the evolution of immigrant earnings in the United States between 1970 and 2010. There are cohort effects not only in wage levels, with more recent cohorts having lower entry wages through 1990, but also in the rate of wage growth, with more recent cohorts experiencing less economic assimilation. The slowdown in assimilation is partly related to a concurrent decline in the rate at which the new immigrants add to their human cap…
Which Peers Matter? The Relative Impacts of Collaborators, Colleagues, and Competitors
Many economists believe knowledge production generates positive spillovers among knowledge producers. The available evidence, however, is mixed. We argue that spillovers can exist along three dimensions: idea, geographic, and collaboration space. To isolate the key channel through which knowledge spills over, we use a unique data set to examine the impact of a large post-1992 exodus of Soviet mathematicians on the output of the nonémigrés. Althou…
Immigration Economics
Nearly 3% of the world's population no longer live in the country where they were born. George Borjas synthesizes the theories, models, and econometric methods used to identify the causes and consequences of international labor flows, and lays out with clarity a full spectrum of topics with crucial implications for framing debates over immigration
The analytics of the wage effect of immigration
The theory of factor demand has important implications for the study of the impact of immigration on wages. This paper derives the theoretical implications in the context of a general equilibrium model where the wage impact depends on the elasticity of product demand, the rate at which the consumer base expands as immigrants enter the receiving country, the elasticity of supply of capital, and the elasticity of substitution among inputs of produc…
The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians
It has been difficult to open up the black box of knowledge production. We use unique international data on the publications, citations, and affiliations of mathematicians to examine the impact of a large, post-1992 influx of Soviet mathematicians on the productivity of their U.S. counterparts. We find a negative productivity effect on those mathematicians whose research overlapped with that of the Soviets. We also document an increased mobility …
Heaven's Door
The U.S. took in more than a million immigrants per year in the late 1990s, more than at any other time in history. For humanitarian and many other reasons, this may be good news. But as George Borjas shows in Heaven's Door , it's decidedly mixed news for the American economy--and positively bad news for the country's poorest citizens. Widely regarded as the country's leading immigration economist, Borjas presents the most comprehensive, accessib…
Social Security Eligibility and the Labor Supply of Older Immigrants
The employment rate of native-born men falls at a much faster rate than that of immigrants as the two groups approach the age of retirement. The author draws on U.S. Census data from 1960-2000 to examine how the eligibility requirements for Social Security benefits affect immigrants' decisions to leave the labor market as they near retirement age. Because a person needs to have worked in the United States for at least ten years to qualify for ben…
The Economic Benefits from Immigration
Natives benefit from immigration mainly because of production complementarities between immigrant workers and other factors of production, and these benefits are larger when immigrants are sufficiently 'different' from the stock of native productive inputs. The available evidence suggests that the economic benefits from immigration for the United States are small, on the order of $6 billion and almost certainly less than $20 billion annually. The…
Economic Theory and International Migration
The modern literature on the economics of immigration focuses on three related issues: 1) what determines the size and skill composition of immigrant flows to any particular host country; 2) how do the immigrants adapt to the host country's economy; and 3) what is the impact of immigrants on the host country's economy? This article reviews the theoretical framework and empirical evidence provided by the economics literature on these questions. It…
Mexican Immigration to the United States
From debates on Capitol Hill to the popular media, immigrants are the subject of widespread controversy. By 2003, their growing numbers accounted for 28.3 percent of all foreign-born inhabitants of the United States. Mexican Immigration to the United analyzes the astonishing economic impact of this historically unprecedented influx. Why do immigrants gain citizenship and employment at a slower rate than non-Mexicans? Does their migration to the U…
Economic Theory and International Migration
George J. Borjas, Economic Theory and International Migration, The International Migration Review, Vol. 23, No. 3, Special Silver Anniversary Issue: International Migration an Assessment for the 90's (Autumn, 1989), pp. 457-485
Homeownership in the immigrant population
Does Unemployment Cause Future Unemployment? Definitions, Questions and Answers from a Continuous Time Model of Heterogeneity and State Dependence
Recent research demonstrates that, the greater the number of previous spells of unemployment and the longer their duration, the more likely is the event that an individual will be unemployed at a point in time. Two explanations have been advanced to interpret this finding. The first is rooted in economic theory; the second is based solely on statistical considerations
Self-selection and internal migration in the United States
The Earnings of Male Hispanic Immigrants in the United States
This paper presents an empirical analysis of earnings differentials among male Hispanic immigrants in the United States. The principal finding of the study is that there are major differences in the rate of economic mobility of the various Hispanic groups. In particular, the rate of economic progress by Cuban immigrants exceeds that of other Hispanic groups, the result in part of the fact that Cuban immigrants have invested more heavily in U.S. s…
Long-Run Convergence of Ethnic Skill Differentials
This paper investigates whether the ethnic skill differentials introduced into the United States by the inflow of very dissimilar immigrant groups during the Great Migration of 1880-1910 have disappeared during the past century. An analysis of the 1910, 1940, and 1980 Censuses and the General Social Surveys reveals that those ethnic differentials have indeed narrowed, but that it might take four generations, or roughly 100 years, for them to disa…
Immigrants, Minorities, and Labor Market Competition
This paper investigates the extent of labor market competition among immigrants, minorities, and the native population. An analysis of 1980 U.S. Census data reveals that immigrants tend to be substitutes for some labor market groups and complements for others. The effects of shifts in immigrant supply on the earnings of native-born men are, however, very small. On the other hand, increases in the supply of immigrants do have a sizable impact on t…
To Ghetto or Not to Ghetto
Immigrant Participation in the Welfare System
This paper presents an empirical analysis of immigrant participation in the welfare system using the 1970 and 1980 U.S. Censuses. The availability of two cross-sections allows for identification of cohort and assimilation effects. The data indicate that recent immigrant cohorts use the welfare system more intensively than earlier cohorts. In addition, the longer an immigrant household has been in the United States, the more likely it is to receiv…
Consumer Discrimination and Self-Employment
Self-employment rates and incomes differ significantly by race. We show that these differentials arise in markets with consumer discrimination and incomplete information about the price of the good and the race of the seller. Equilibrium income distributions have two properties: mean black incomes are lower than mean white incomes, and the returns to ability are lower for black than for white sellers. Able blacks, therefore, are less likely to se…
Self-selection of Emigrants
The Roy model has more precise predictions about the self-selection of migrants than previously realised. The conditions shown to result in positive or negative selection in terms of expected earnings also imply a stochastic dominance relationship between the earnings distributions of migrants and non-migrants. We test these predictions using the Danish full population administrative data. We find strong evidence of positive self-selection of emi…
Immigration and the Economic Status of African‐American Men
The employment rate of black men, and particularly of low‐skilled black men, fell precipitously between 1960 and 2000. At the same time, their incarceration rate rose. This paper examines the relation between immigration and these trends in employment and incarceration. Using data from the 1960–2000 US censuses, we find that a 10% immigration‐induced increase in the supply of workers in a particular skill group reduced the black wage of that grou…
Heaven's Door
Welfare Reform and Immigrant Participation in Welfare Programs
This article examines the impact of the 1996 welfare reform legislation on welfare use in immigrant households. Although the data indicate that the welfare participation rate of immigrants declined relative to that of natives at the national level, this national trend is entirely attributable to the trends in welfare participation in California. Immigrants living in California experienced a precipitous drop in their welfare participation rate (re…
The Employment and Wages of Legalized Immigrants
This article analyzes the employment and wages of recently legalized immigrants using the Legalization Application Processing System (LAPS) file, an administrative file based on the individual records of amnesty applicants, and draws comparisons with a sample of the foreign-born population from the Current Population Surveys of 1983, 1986 and 1988. Compared to the total foreign-born population, the legalized immigrant population differs in four i…
The Wage Impact of the Marielitos
This article brings a new perspective to the analysis of the wage effects of the Mariel boatlift crisis, in which an estimated 125,000 Cuban refugees migrated to Florida between April and October, 1980. The author revisits the question of wage impacts from such a supply shock, drawing on the cumulative insights of research on the economic impact of immigration. That literature shows that the wage impact must be measured by carefully matching the …
The Employment and Wages of Legalized Immigrants
Wage Determination in the Federal Government
The existence of significant wage differentials among "similar" individuals employed by different agencies in the federal government is explored. The theoretical framework proposes that the underlying reason for these differentials may be linked to the political influence exhibited by the constituencies and bureaucracies of federal agencies. The empirical results indicate that employees in federal agencies with small and well-organized constituen…
The analytics of the wage effect of immigration
The theory of factor demand has important implications for the study of the impact of immigration on wages. This paper derives the theoretical implications in the context of a general equilibrium model where the wage impact depends on the elasticity of product demand, the rate at which the consumer base expands as immigrants enter the receiving country, the elasticity of supply of capital, and the elasticity of substitution among inputs of produc…
The earnings of Mexican immigrants in the United States
From Immigrants to Robots
Using numbers of industrial robots shipped to primarily manufacturing industries as a supply shock to an industry labor market, we estimate that an additional robot reduces employment by roughly two to three workers overall and by three to four workers when robots are likely to be good substitutes for humans. The supply shock also reduces wages. The estimates far exceed those of an additional immigrant on employment and wages. While growth of rob…
Job Mobility and Earnings over the Life Cycle
Previous studies have shown that in the short run quits generally lead to wage increases on the next job and layoffs to no increase or to a wage cut. The author of this study argues, however, that the prospect of a job change for any reason creates a disincentive for a worker to invest in training that is specific to the current job, and therefore those who change jobs frequently may earn less over their life cycle than those who, other things eq…
Wage Determination in the Federal Government
The existence of significant wage differentials among "similar" individuals employed by different agencies in the federal government is explored. The theoretical framework proposes that the underlying reason for these differentials may be linked to the political influence exhibited by the constituencies and bureaucracies of federal agencies. The empirical results indicate that employees in federal agencies with small and well-organized constituen…
Does Unemployment Cause Future Unemployment? Definitions, Questions and Answers from a Continuous Time Model of Heterogeneity and State Dependence
Recent research demonstrates that, the greater the number of previous spells of unemployment and the longer their duration, the more likely is the event that an individual will be unemployed at a point in time. Two explanations have been advanced to interpret this finding. The first is rooted in economic theory; the second is based solely on statistical considerations
Job Mobility and Earnings over the Life Cycle
Previous studies have shown that in the short run quits generally lead to wage increases on the next job and layoffs to no increase or to a wage cut. The author of this study argues, however, that the prospect of a job change for any reason creates a disincentive for a worker to invest in training that is specific to the current job, and therefore those who change jobs frequently may earn less over their life cycle than those who, other things eq…
The Earnings of Male Hispanic Immigrants in the United States
This paper presents an empirical analysis of earnings differentials among male Hispanic immigrants in the United States. The principal finding of the study is that there are major differences in the rate of economic mobility of the various Hispanic groups. In particular, the rate of economic progress by Cuban immigrants exceeds that of other Hispanic groups, the result in part of the fact that Cuban immigrants have invested more heavily in U.S. s…
The Labor Supply of Male Hispanic Immigrants in the United States
Several recent studies have begun the systematic analysis of the labor market characteristics of Hispanics in the United States. This research has focused on two related issues: a) how the immigration and assimilation experience affects Hispanic earnings; 2 and b) the measurement of wage differentials between Hispanics and non-Hispanics. 3 The main findings of this research are that the earnings of (some) Hispanic immigrants rise rapidly after im…
The Labor Supply of Male Hispanic Immigrants in the United States
The Measurement of Race and Gender Wage Differentials
This paper presents an empirical analysis of wage differentials based on race and gender in the federal bureaucracy. By focusing on the study of interagency variations in wage differentials, the author shows, first, that the use in earnings functions of a simple dummy variable to indicate race and gender leads to downward-biased estimates of the standardized wage differential. Second, across federal agencies there is a positive correlation betwee…
Assimilation, Changes in Cohort Quality, and the Earnings of Immigrants
This paper reexamines the empirical basis for two "facts" that seem to be found in most cross-section studies of immigrant earnings: (1) the earnings of immigrants grow rapidly as they assimilate into the United States; and (2) this rapid growth leads to many immigrants' overtaking the earnings of the natives within 10-15 years after immigration. Using the 1970 and 1980 U.S. censuses, this paper studies the earnings growth experienced by specific…
The Self-Employment Experience of Immigrants
Self-employment is an important aspect of the immigrant experience in the labor market. Self-employment rates for immigrants exceed 15 percent for some national groups. This paper addresses three related questions on the self—employment experience of immigrants. First, how do self-employment rates of immigrants compare to those of native-born men? Second, is there an 'assimilationtt effect on the self-employment propensity of immigrants? Finally,…
The Sensitivity of Labor Demand Functions to Choice of Dependent Variable
This paper investigates whether the parameters of labor demand functions are sensitive to alternative methods of estimation.The assumption that the production technology is of the Generalized Leontief type implies that the demand system can be estimated by analyzing cross-section differences in earnings across labor markets, by studying longitudinal changes in earnings within a labor market, or by investigating cross-section differences in labor …
Hispanics in the U.S. Economy
The earnings of state government employees in the United States
Labor Markets
Immigrants, Minorities, and Labor Market Competition
This paper investigates the extent of labor market competition among immigrants, minorities, and the native population. An analysis of 1980 U.S. Census data reveals that immigrants tend to be substitutes for some labor market groups and complements for others. The effects of shifts in immigrant supply on the earnings of native-born men are, however, very small. On the other hand, increases in the supply of immigrants do have a sizable impact on t…
Immigrant and Emigrant Earnings
This paper analyzes the relationship between earnings and the extent of assimilation, cohort quality change, and return migration experienced by the foreign‐born population. The study uses the longitudinal data available in the Survey of Natural and Social Scientists and Engineers. The analysis reveals that there was a sizable decline in the skills of this population over the last two decades. In addition, the study shows that return migration is…
International Differences in the Labor Market Performance of Immigrants
The author provides substantive insights into the self-selection process that determines the composition of the pool of migrants. He also illustrates the importance of immigration policy in determining both the national origin and skill composition of migrant flow reaching a country of destination
Economic Theory and International Migration
The modern literature on the economics of immigration focuses on three related issues: 1) what determines the size and skill composition of immigrant flows to any particular host country; 2) how do the immigrants adapt to the host country's economy; and 3) what is the impact of immigrants on the host country's economy? This article reviews the theoretical framework and empirical evidence provided by the economics literature on these questions. It…
Economic Theory and International Migration
George J. Borjas, Economic Theory and International Migration, The International Migration Review, Vol. 23, No. 3, Special Silver Anniversary Issue: International Migration an Assessment for the 90's (Autumn, 1989), pp. 457-485
Consumer Discrimination and Self-Employment
Self-employment rates and incomes differ significantly by race. We show that these differentials arise in markets with consumer discrimination and incomplete information about the price of the good and the race of the seller. Equilibrium income distributions have two properties: mean black incomes are lower than mean white incomes, and the returns to ability are lower for black than for white sellers. Able blacks, therefore, are less likely to se…
The Economics of Immigration
Friends or Strangers
Immigrants in 1980
International Differences in the Labor Market Performance of Immigrants
Immigrant Participation in the Welfare System
This paper presents an empirical analysis of immigrant participation in the welfare system using the 1970 and 1980 U.S. Censuses. The availability of two cross-sections allows for identification of cohort and assimilation effects. The data indicate that recent immigrant cohorts use the welfare system more intensively than earlier cohorts. In addition, the longer an immigrant household has been in the United States, the more likely it is to receiv…
International Differences in the Labor Market Performance of Immigrants
was established on July 1, 1945.It is an activity of the W. E. Upjohn Unemployment Trustee Corporation, which was formed in 1932 to administer a
Economics (87 obras) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (70 obras) · Immigration (62 obras) · Political science (62 obras) · Demographic economics (60 obras) · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy (48 obras) · Labour economics (46 obras) · Sociology (36 obras) · Law (33 obras) · Wage (22 obras)