Using comprehensive longitudinal matched employer-employee data for the U.S., this paper provides new evidence on the relationship between productivity and immigration spawned urban diversity. Existing empirical work has uncovered a robust positive correlation between productivity and immigrant diversity, supporting theory suggesting that diversity acts as a local public good that makes workers more productive by enlarging the pool of knowledge available to them, as well as by fostering opportunities for them to recombine ideas to generate novelty. This paper makes several empirical and conceptual contributions. First, it improves on existing empirical work by addressing various sources of potential bias, especially from unobserved heterogeneity among individuals, work establishments, and cities. Second, it augments identification by using longitudinal data that permits examination of how diversity and productivity co-move. Third, the paper seeks to reveal whether diversity acts upon productivity chiefly at the scale of the city or the workplace. Findings confirm that urban immigrant diversity produces positive and nontrivial spillovers for U.S. workers. This social return represents a distinct channel through which immigration generates broad-based economic benefits.
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Urban Immigrant Diversity and Inclusive Institutions
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-07
Recent evidence suggests that rising immigrant diversity in cities offers economic benefits, including improved innovation, entrepreneurship and productivity. One potentially important but underexplored dimension of this relationship is how local institutional context shapes the benefits firms and workers receive from the diversity in their midst. Theory suggests that institutions can make it less costly for diverse workers to transact, thereby catalyzing the latent bene ts of heterogeneity. This paper tests the hypothesis that the effects of immigrant diversity on productivity will be stronger in locations featuring more 'inclusive" institutions. It leverages comprehensive longitudinal linked employer-employee data for the U.S. and two distinct measures of inclusive institutions at the metropolitan area level: social capital and pro- or anti-immigrant ordinances. Findings confirm the importance of institutional context: in cities with low levels of inclusive institutions, the benefits of diversity are modest and in some cases statistically insignificant; in cities with high levels of inclusive institutions, the benefits of immigrant diversity are positive, significant, and substantial. Moreover, natives residing in cities that have enacted laws restricting immigrants enjoy no diversity spillovers whatsoever, while immigrants in these cities continue to receive a diversity bonus. These results confirm the economic significance of urban immigrant diversity, while suggesting the importance of local social and economic institutions.
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Immigrant Diversity and Complex Problem Solving
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-04
In the growing literature exploring the links between immigrant diversity and worker productivity, recent evidence strongly suggests that diversity generates productivity improvements. However, even the most careful extant empirical work remains at some remove from the mechanisms that theory says underlie this relationship: interpersonal interaction in the service of complex problem solving. This paper aims to `stress-test' these theoretical foundations, by observing how the relationship between diversity and productivity varies across workers differently engaged in complex problem solving and interaction. Using a uniquely comprehensive matched employer-employee dataset for the United States between 1991 and 2008, this paper shows that growing immigrant diversity inside cities and workplaces offers much stronger benefits for workers intensively engaged in various forms of complex problem solving, including tasks involving high levels of innovation, creativity, and STEM. Moreover, such effects are considerably stronger for those whose work requires high levels of both problem solving and interaction.
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Estimating the Local Productivity Spillovers from Science
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-56
We estimate the local productivity spillovers from science by relating wages and real estate
prices across metros to measures of scienti c activity in those metros. We address three fundamental challenges: (1) factor input adjustments using wages and real estate prices, along with Shepards Lemma, to estimate changes metros' productivity, which must equal changes in unit production cost; (2) unobserved differences in metros/causality using a share shift index that exploits historic variation in the mix of research in metros interacted with trends in federal funding for specific fields as an instrument; (3) unobserved differences in workers using data on the states in which people are born. Our estimates show a strong positive relationship between wages and scientifc research and a weak positive relationship for real estate prices. Overall, we estimate high rate of return to research.
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Cheap Imports and the Loss of U.S. Manufacturing Jobs
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-05
This paper examines the role of international trade, and specifically imports from low-wage countries, in determining patterns of job loss in U.S. manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2007. Motivated by intuitions from factor-proportions-inspired work on offshoring and heterogeneous firms in trade, we build industry-level measures of import competition. Combining worker data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics dataset, detailed establishment information from the Census of Manufactures, and transaction-level trade data, we find that rising import competition from China and other developing economies increases the likelihood of job loss among manufacturing workers with less than a high school degree; it is not significantly related to job losses for workers with at least a college degree.
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Whose Job Is It Anyway? Co-Ethnic Hiring in New U.S. Ventures
March 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-05
We explore co-ethnic hiring among new ventures using U.S. administrative data. Co-ethnic hiring is ubiquitous among immigrant groups, averaging about 22.5% and ranging from 2% to 40%. Co-ethnic hiring grows with the size of the local ethnic workforce, greater linguistic distance to English, lower cultural/genetic similarity to U.S. natives, and in harsher policy environments for immigrants. Co ethnic hiring is remarkably persistent for ventures and for individuals. Co-ethnic hiring is associated with greater venture survival and growth when thick local ethnic employment surrounds the business. Our results are consistent with a blend of hiring due to information advantages within ethnic groups with some taste-based hiring.
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Smart Cafe Cities: Testing Human Capital Externalities in the Boston Metropolitan Area
October 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-24
Existing studies have explored either only one or two of the mechanisms that human capital externalities percolate at only macrogeographic levels. This paper uses the 1990 Massachusetts Census data and tests four mechanisms at the microgeographic levels in the Boston metropolitan area labor market. We propose that individual workers can learn from their occupational and industrial peers in the same local labor market through four channels: depth of human capital stock, Marshallian labor market externalities, Jacobs labor market externalities, and thickness of the local labor market. We find that all types of human capital externalities are significant across Census blocks. Different types of externalities attenuate at different speeds over distances. For example, the effect of human capital depth decays rapidly beyond three miles away from block centroid. We conclude that knowledge spillovers are very localized within microgeographic scope in cities that we call Smart Caf' Cities.
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What Has Been Capitalized into Property Values: Human Capital, Social Capital, or Cultural Capital?
October 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-25
Urban amenities can be capitalized into land values or property values. However, little attention has been paid to the capitalization of social amenities. This paper classifies three types of social-interaction-based social amenities: human capital, social capital, and cultural capital at residential neighborhood levels. We use the restricted version of the 1990 Massachusetts Census data and estimate hedonic housing models with social amenities. The findings are as follows: (1) Human capital has significant positive effects on property values. This tests the Lucas conjecture. (2) Different types of social capital have different effects on property values: an increase in the percentage of new residents has significant positive effects on property values, probably due to the strength of weak ties. However, an increase in the percentage of single-parent households has negative effects on property values. An increase in the home ownership rate has positive effects at large geographic levels. (3) Cultural capital effects vary from high to low geographic levels, the effects of English proficiency and racial homogeneity are positive at and beyond the tract level, but insignificant at the block level. This may imply that cultural capital is more important in social interactions at large geographic scale.
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Who Gains from Creative Destruction? Evidence from High-Quality Entrepreneurship in the United States
October 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-29
The question of who gains from high-quality entrepreneurship is crucial to understanding whether investments in incubating potentially innovative start-up firms will produce socially beneficial outcomes. We attempt to bring new evidence to this question by combining new aggregate measures of local area income inequality and income mobility with measures of entrepreneurship from Guzman and Stern (2017). Our new aggregate measures are generated by linking American Community Survey data with the universe of IRS 1040 tax returns. In both fixed effects and IV models using a Bartik-style instrument, we find that entrepreneurship increases income inequality. Further, we find that this increase in income inequality arises due to the fact that almost all of the individual gains associated with increased entrepreneurship accrue to the top 10 percent of the income distribution. While we find mixed evidence for small positive effects of entrepreneurship lower on the income distribution, we find little if any evidence that entrepreneurship increases income mobility.
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Immigration and Entrepreneurship in the United States
December 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-44
Immigrants can expand labor supply and compete for jobs with native-born workers. But immigrants may also start new firms, expanding labor demand. This paper uses U.S. administrative data and other data sources to study the role of immigrants in entrepreneurship. We ask how often immigrants start companies, how many jobs these firms create, and how firms founded by native-born individuals compare. A simple model provides a measurement framework for addressing the dual roles of immigrants as founders and workers. The findings suggest that immigrants act more as 'job creators' than 'job takers' and play outsized roles in U.S. high-growth entrepreneurship.
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IT Investment and Firm Performance in U.S. Retail Trade
June 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-14
We examine the relationships between investments in information technology (IT) and two measures of retail firm performance -- productivity and establishment growth -- over the 1992 to 1997 period. We use untapped firm and establishment micro data from the Censuses of Retail Trade and the Assets and Expenditures Survey. We show that large firms account for most retail IT investment, employment and establishment growth. We find evidence of a significant relationship between IT investment intensity and productivity growth. We found no such evidence of a link between IT growth in the number of establishments operated by retail firms.
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