Saturday, November 21, 2009

Immigration and the economy

Immigration is an important issue for the Irish economy and a relatively new one at that. It is also quite a sensitive one with people taking quite partisan approaches. So its important to keep an eye on what the evidence actually shows. See this paper for the US by G Peri:

Abstract
We present three main findings, two of which are quite new in this literature. First, we confirm that immigrants do not crowd-out employment of (or hours worked by) natives but simply add to total employment. Second, we find that they increase total factor productivity significantly and, third, that such efficiency gains are unskilled-biased—larger, that is, for less educated workers.

http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gperi/Papers/peri_accounting_sept_09.pdf

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