Essays on immigrants and their impact on the local labour market
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The first chapter studies how low-skilled immigrant entry can explain the falling labour unionization rate in the U.S. economy. This paper argues that the entry of immigrants has significantly altered the incentives of native-born workers to join labour unions and for firms to hire unionized workers, prompting a fall in unionization. The chapter uses spatial variation in immigrant entry to show that a higher entry of immigrants leads to a higher fall in unionization rates across regions in the U.S. It develops a search-theoretic framework to bear out the mechanism and test some over-identifying predictions. The model is further calibrated and finds that low-skilled immigrant entry can explain 48-55% of the total fall in union density. The second chapter exploits plausibly exogenous changes in exchange rates across source countries for immigrants in Canada to evaluate how these changes impact their earnings. It presents evidence that Canadian immigrants, in response to a 10 per cent depreciation of the home currency relative to the Canadian dollar, reduce their annual earnings by 0.36 per cent, mainly by reducing hours worked. The effect is greater for recent male immigrants, who are less educated and their spouses abroad. They also tend to be from lower-income countries and located in immigrant enclaves. Crucially, remittance senders are more affected, but these exchange rate fluctuations do not affect the amount of remittance sent. Thus, suggesting that immigrants tend to be target earners and react accordingly to exchange rate fluctuations. The third chapter examines how immigrants' labour market conditions at the point of entry affect their earnings, labour market outcomes, and reverse migration decisions both in the short and long run. Using administrative tax data, this chapter finds that it takes 12-15 years for an initial adverse effect of entering the labour market when unemployment is high to dissipate completely. It further documents the heterogeneity existing in this impact based on age, gender, marital status, country of origin, and education. The chapter provides novel insights into the outmigration behaviour of immigrants and how it depends on the initial conditions they face post-arrival.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".