Abstract—This paper uses three years of individual-level data to analyze the determinants of individual preferences over immigration policy in the United States. We have two main empirical results. First, less-skilled workers are signi � cantly more likely to prefer limiting immigrant in � ows into the United States. Our � nding suggests that, over the time horizons that are relevant to individuals when evaluating immigration policy, individuals think that the U.S. economy absorbs immigrant in � ows at least partly by changing wages. Second, we � nd no evidence that the relationship between skills and immigration opinions is stronger in high-immigration communities. I.

The key stylized facts of the housing market are positive serial correlation of price changes at one year frequencies and mean reversion over longer periods, strong persistence in construction, and highly volatile prices and construction levels within markets over time. We calibrate a dynamic model of housing in the spatial equilibrium tradition of Rosen and Roback to see whether such a model can generate these facts. With reasonable parameter values, this model readily explains the mean reversion of prices over five year periods, but cannot explain the observed positive serial correlation at higher frequencies. The model predicts the positive serial correlation of new construction that we see in the data and the volatility of both prices and quantities in the typical market, and it can account for substantial variation on construction intensity across markets. However, the model cannot explain the most volatile markets in terms of low frequency price changes. More research is needed to determine whether measurement errorrelated data smoothing or market inefficiency can best account for the persistence of high frequency price changes. With respect to the extremely high house price change volatility in certain coastal markets, more research is needed to ascertain whether shocks to interest rates or better measurement of local income variability can match this moment of data without appealing to some type of animal spirits. This is an updated version of NBER working paper #12787. Glaeser thanks the Taubman Center for

An earlier and shortened version of this paper was given as a speech at a lunch for members of the Cambridgeshire Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, 4th January 2007.

Rebecca London, Sam Myers, Gerald Oettinger, participants in the conference and seminars at Northwestern University and... and at the Bay Area Labor Economists meetings for useful Previous studies tend to find that immigration has a weak negative effect on the employment and earnings of native-born workers. These studies generally overlook the effect of immigration on an important sector of the labor force, the self-employed. Anecdotal evidence suggests that immigrants, especially those from Asian countries, may displace black-owned business owners. We use Census of Population microdata to examine if black self-employment levels are lower in labor markets which have a higher share of immigrants. We define labor markets as metropolitan areas (MAs) and use the variation across 94 MAs in the U.S. to examine the relationship between black self-employment and immigration in both 1980 and 1990. To control for permanent differences across MAs in other influences, we also estimate the effect of the change in immigration from 1980 to 1990 on the change in black self-employment over this period. We generally find that immigration has no effect or only a small negative but statistically insignificant effect on black male or female self-employment. Our findings are similar if we weight immigration rates by the propensity of immigrant groups to be self-employed or if we limit our sample of immigrants to those from only Asian countries. With only a few exceptions, our findings are quite robust to alternative estimation techniques and specifications

Over the last 30 years, the U.S. labor market has been transformed by the ’second great migration’. Much of this immigration has been among the lower skilled; the share of High School Dropout (HSD) workers who are foreign born increased from 12 % in 1980 to 44 % in 2007. At the same time, native born HSD workers grew more slowly than any other educational category, falling by nearly 6%. These two outcomes have inevitably lead to much speculation that immigrants depress the wages of similarly skilled natives. The labor economics literature, however, has found little empirical evidence to support this claim. We aim to assess whether the impact of immigration is mitigated by occupational transition of natives. Being over represented among HSDs, we focus on the labor market outcomes for Black workers. We use data from the 5 % public use sample of the census(1980, 1990 and 2000) as well as the 1 % sample of the population from the American Community Survey (2005, 2006 and 2007) to estimate the effect of occupational reallocation on the wages of Black workers as well as the effect of immigration on reallocation. A shift-share analysis reveals that occupational transitions caused wages for Blacks to raise by 46 % more than they would have with a static occupational distribution. However, we find that these occupational shifts were due to crowding out effect of Hispanics on Black occupations: a 10 percentage point increase in the share of workers in an occupation who are Hispanics leads to a 5 percentage point decrease in the share of Black workers in that occupation. This is significantly large to explain substantially occupations that declined in importance for Blacks during the period of study. We find a strong correlation between importance of occupations to Hispanics and Blacks, suggesting that most occupational transition for these two groups has not only been driven by outside factors such as trade and 1 technological change, but that these shocks are affecting the two groups similarly. Preliminary draft, please do not cite. Comments are welcome ( Research has been supported by a grant from the University of California

sections of text, not to exceed three paragraphs, to be quoted without written permission, provided that full attribution is given to the source and the above copyright notice is included. Foreword This report on income distribution is the first research publication of the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). In developing the initial research agenda for the institute, we focused on fundamental changes that are sweeping the state. Of the many possibilities, one area that clearly deserves a place on our list is the dramatically changing nature of the state’s economy. California has emerged from its deepest recession since the 1930s. The economy is expanding steadily, with hundreds of thousands of jobs being created annually. In the bloom of this recovery, it makes sense to step back and look at the changes in the distribution of income in California that have occurred in recent years and over the last several decades. Recent efforts to measure and explain changes in income distribution

The mobility of labor seldom if ever matches that of capital, but the end of the cold war seemed for a time to be the start of a new era of accelerated population movements. Just as foreign investment and trade restrictions were being widely dismantled, so were many national barriers to intercountry migrants. The most dramatic case was, of course, the opening of Eastern Europe's borders to permit massive out-migration. From 1989 to 1992, over 2.1 million applied for asylum in the West. Concurrently, the European Union moved toward relaxation of internal border checks under the Schengen Accord. And in the United States, new 1990 entry criteria raised considerably the official ceiling on legal green card admissions. However, by the mid-nineties, all Western European countries had moved to sharply curtail inmigration from non-EU nations, and full implementation of Schengen was being delayed by several countries worried about weak external border controls in poorer member states. Likewise, in the U.S., the 1990 legislation was targeted for early reversal by new restrictive bills passing quickly through the Republican Congress, with considerable bipartisan support. This sharp reversal of policy, both here and abroad, reflects in part the emergence of highly nationalistic and ethnocentric political forces opposed on principle to sizable foreign-born

Migration has become a major global phenomenon in recent decades. As well as permanent migrants and their families there are seasonal and temporary workers, frontier workers, illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers. In Africa the traditional movement of traders and seasonal workers has been obscured by the large number of refugees from political conflict. In Asia there has been temporary migration from the Indian subcontinent to meet the labour shortages of the Middle East. In Europe the long established migration patterns from ex-colonies to the UK and France, and of Turks to Germany, has been supplemented by new flows into the traditional countries of emigration such as Italy, Spain and Portugal. At the same time the political changes in Central and Eastern Europe have created new and substantial immigration pressures upon the Community. For the developing countries, from which these immigrants principally come, these outflows usually offer significant economic advantages. Faced with high rates of population growth and limited employment creation immigration offers a safety valve. Remittances can be a significant source of foreign exchange, while returning migrants may bring capital and skills to foster economic growth. Only the loss of any scarce skilled and qualified labour may inhibit

This paper represents the opinions of the authors. It is not meant to represent, in any way, the opinions or official positions of any institution with they may have ever been affiliated in any way, nor of staff of such institutions. November 1997 Trade Policy and North-South Migration Differences in the rate of population growth between developed and developing countries have potentially important implications for patterns of trade, migration, and the distribution of the gains from economic activity, both within and between nations. This paper focuses on migration-related effects. We offer a theoretical discussion of explicit theoretical linkages between population growth, trade policy and migration. This is illustrated with numerical examples emphasizing linkages between the changes in the terms of trade and migration patterns. The numerical analysis highlights issues not immediately evident from marginal analysis, including variations in the impact of policy over different time horizons.

This paper uses three years of individual-level data to analyze the determinants of individual preferences over trade and immigration policies in the United States. Different economic models make contrasting predictions about what forces should shape these preferences. We have four main empirical results. First, we find that factor type dominates industry of employment in explaining support for trade barriers This result is consistent with a Heckscher-Ohlin model of the United States in which the country is well endowed with skilled labor relative to the rest of the world. Second, we find that home ownership also matters for individuals ' trade-policy preferences. Independent of factor type, home ownership in counties with a manufacturing mix concentrated in comparative-disadvantage industries is strongly correlated with support for trade barriers. This finding suggests that in addition to current factor incomes driving preferences as in standard trade models, in reality preferences also depend on asset values. Third, less-skilled workers are significantly more likely to prefer limiting immigrant inflows into the United States. This result suggests that over time horizons relevant to individuals when evaluating immigration policy, individuals think that the U.S. economy absorbs immigrant inflows at least partly by changing wages. These preferences are consistent with a "multi-cone " Heckscher Ohlin trade model and with a factor-proportions-analysis labor model. Fourth, we find no evidence that less-skilled