How readily do potential migrants respond to increased returns to migration? Even if origin areas become less attractive vis-'-vis migration destinations, fixed costs can prevent increased migration. We examine migration responses to hurricanes, which reduce the attractiveness of origin locations. Restricted-access U.S. Census data allows precise migration measures and analysis of more migrant-origin countries. Hurricanes increase U.S. immigration, with the effect increasing in the size of prior migrant stocks. Large migrant networks reduce fixed costs by facilitating legal immigration from
hurricane-affected source countries. Hurricane-induced immigration can be fully accounted for by new legal permanent residents ('green card' holders).
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Covering Undocumented Immigrants: The Effects of a Large-Scale Prenatal Care Intervention
August 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-28
Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for public insurance coverage for prenatal care in most states, despite their children representing a large fraction of births and having U.S. citizenship. In this paper, we examine a policy that expanded Medicaid pregnancy coverage to undocumented immigrants. Using a novel dataset that links California birth records to Census surveys, we identify siblings born to immigrant mothers before and after the policy. Implementing a mothers' fixed effects design, we find that the policy increased coverage for and use of prenatal care among pregnant immigrant women, and increased average gestation length and birth weight among their children.
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A Shock by Any Other Name? Reconsidering the Impacts of Local Demand Shocks
February 2026
Working Paper Number:
CES-26-10
Over the last decade, research on labor market adjustment following local demand shocks has expanded to explore a wide variety of measured shocks. However, the worker adjustments observed in response to these shocks are not always consistent across studies. We create a harmonized set of annual commuting-zone-level shocks following the major approaches in the literature to investigate these differences. As one might expect, shocks of different types exhibit different geographic and temporal patterns and are generally weakly correlated with each other. We find they also generate different employment and migration responses, with trade-related shocks showing little response on either margin, while more general Bartik-style shocks are associated with economically meaningful changes in both employment and migration.
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Bank Crises and Investor Confidence
January 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-02
In addition to their direct effects, episodes of financial instability may decrease investor confidence. Measuring the impact of a crisis on investor confidence is complicated by the fact that it is difficult to disentangle the effect of investor confidence from coincident direct effects of the crisis. In order to isolate the effects of financial crises on investor confidence, we study the investment behavior of immigrants in the U.S. Our findings indicate that systemic banking crises have important effects on investor behavior. Immigrants who have experienced a banking crisis in their countries of origin are significantly less likely to have bank accounts in the U.S. This finding is robust to including important individual controls like wealth, education, income, and age. In addition, the effect of crises is robust to controlling for a variety of country of origin characteristics, including measures of financial and economic development and specifications with country of origin fixed effects.
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FALLING HOUSE PRICES AND LABOR MOBILITY: EVIDENCE FROM MATCHED EMPLOYER-EMPLOYEE DATA
August 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-43
This study uses worker-level employment data from the U.S. Census Bureau to test whether falling home prices affect a worker's propensity to take a job in a different metropolitan area from where he is currently located. Using a sample of workers from the American Community Survey, I employ a within-MSA-time estimation that compares homeowners to renters in their propensities to relocate for jobs according to data from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics database. This strategy allows me to disentangle the influence of house prices from that of other time-varying, location-specific shocks. Estimates show that homeowners who have experienced declines in the nominal value of their home are approximately 20% less likely to take a new job in a location outside of the metropolitan area that they currently live and work in, relative to an equivalent renter. This evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that housing lock-in has contributed to the decreased labor mobility of homeowners during the recent housing bust.
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Racial Disparity in an Era of Increasing Income Inequality
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-01
Using unique linked data, we examine income inequality and mobility across racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Our data encompass the universe of tax filers in the U.S. for the period 2000 to 2014, matched with individual-level race and ethnicity information from multiple censuses and American Community Survey data. We document both income inequality and mobility trends over the period. We find significant stratification in terms of average incomes by race and ethnic group and distinct differences in within-group income inequality. The groups with the highest incomes - Whites and Asians - also have the highest levels of within-group inequality and the lowest levels of within-group mobility. The reverse is true for the lowest-income groups: Blacks, American Indians, and Hispanics have lower within-group inequality and immobility. On the other hand, our low-income groups are also highly immobile when looking at overall, rather than within-group, mobility. These same groups also have a higher probability of experiencing downward mobility compared with Whites and Asians. We also find that within-group income inequality increased for all groups between 2000 and 2014, and the increase was especially large for Whites. In regression analyses using individual-level panel data, we find persistent differences by race and ethnicity in incomes over time. We also examine young tax filers (ages 25-35) and investigate the long-term effects of local economic and racial residential segregation conditions at the start of their careers. We find persistent long-run effects of racial residential segregation at career entry on the incomes of certain groups. The picture that emerges from our analysis is of a rigid income structure, with mainly Whites and Asians confined to the top and Blacks, American Indians, and Hispanics confined to the bottom.
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Immigration and Local Business Dynamics:
Evidence from U.S. Firms
August 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-18
This paper finds that establishment entry and exit'particularly the prevention of establishment exit'drive immigrant absorption and immigrant-induced productivity increases in U.S. local industries. Using a comprehensive collection of confidential survey and administrative
data from the Census Bureau, it shows that inflows of immigrantworkers lead to more establishment entry and less establishment exit in local industries. These relationships are responsible for nearly all of long-run immigrant-induced job creation, with 78 percent accounted for by exit prevention alone, leaving a minimal role for continuing establishment expansion. Furthermore, exit prevention is not uniform: immigrant inflows increase the probability of exit by establishments from low productivity firms and decrease the probability of exit by establishments from high productivity firms. As a result, the increase in establishment count is concentrated at the top of the productivity distribution. A general equilibrium model proposes a mechanism that ties immigrantworkers to high productivity firms and shows how accounting for changes to the firm productivity distribution can yield substantially larger estimates of immigrant-generated economic surplus than canonical models of labor demand.
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Parental Death, Inheritance, and Labor Supply in the United States
December 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-71
We are the first to study how inheritances affect labor supply in the U.S. using large-scale administrative data. Leveraging federal tax and Social Security records, we estimate event studies around parental death to investigate impacts on adult children. Our results indicate that the death of a last parent causes sizable gains in investment income'our main proxy for inheritances'and proportionate reductions in labor supply. On average, annual per-adult investment income at the tax unit level increases by about $300 (45 percent) and annual per-adult wage earnings decrease by $600 (2 percent). These earnings responses are large relative to the implied wealth transfer. Income effects are the dominant channel through which parental death reduces earnings, with children of wealthier parents exhibiting larger earnings reductions. Over six years, inheritances slightly equalize the distribution of investment income.
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Locate Your Nearest Exit: Mass Layoffs and Local Labor Market Response
September 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-25
Large shocks to local labor markets cause lasting changes to communities and their residents. We examine four main channels through which the local labor force adjusts following mass layoffs: in- and out-migration, retirement, and disability insurance enrollment. We show that these channels account for over half of the labor force reductions following a mass layoff event. By measuring the residual difference between these channels and labor force change, we also show that labor force non-participation grew in the period during and after the Great Recession. This result highlights the growing importance of non-participation as a response to labor demand shocks.
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Workplace Concentration of Immigrants
November 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-39R
To what extent do immigrants and the native-born work in separate workplaces? Do worker and employer characteristics explain the degree of workplace concentration? We explore these questions using a matched employer-employee database that extensively covers employers in selected MSAs. We find that immigrants are much more likely to have immigrant coworkers than are natives, and are particularly likely to work with their compatriots. We find much higher levels of concentration for small businesses than for large ones, that concentration varies substantially across industries, and that concentration is particularly high among immigrants with limited English skills. We also find evidence that neighborhood job networks are strongly positively associated with concentration. The effects of networks and language remain strong when type is defined by country of origin rather than simply immigrant status. The importance of these factors varies by immigrant country of origin'for example, not speaking English well has a particularly strong association with concentration for immigrants from Asian countries. Controlling for differences across MSAs, we find that observable employer and employee characteristics account for about half of the difference between immigrants and natives in the likelihood of having immigrant coworkers, with differences in industry, residential segregation and English speaking skills being the most important factors.
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The EITC and Intergenerational Mobility
November 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-35
We study how the largest federal tax-based policy intended to promote work and increase incomes among the poor'the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)'affects the socioeconomic standing of children who grew up in households affected by the policy. Using the universe of tax filer records for children linked to their parents, matched with demographic and household information from the decennial Census and American Community Survey data, we exploit exogenous differences by children's ages in the births and 'aging out' of siblings to assess the effect of EITC generosity on child outcomes. We focus on assessing mobility in the child income distribution, conditional on the parents' position in the parental income distribution. Our findings suggest significant and mostly positive effects of more generous EITC refunds on the next generation that vary substantially depending on the child's household type (single-mother or married family) and by the child's gender. All children except White children from single-mother households experience increases in cohort-specific income rank, own family income, and the probability of working at ages 25'26 in response to greater EITC generosity. Children from married households show a considerably stronger response on these measures than do children from single-mother households. Because of the concentration of family types within race groups, the more positive response among children from married households suggests the EITC might lead to higher within-generation racial income inequality. Finally, we examine how the impact of EITC generosity varies by the age at which children are exposed to higher benefits. These results suggest that children who first receive the more generous two-child treatment at later ages have a stronger positive response in terms of rank and family income than children exposed at younger ages.
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