nep-dem New Economics Papers
on Demographic Economics
Issue of 2020‒10‒19
four papers chosen by
Héctor Pifarré i Arolas
Universitat Pompeu Fabra

  1. Immigration and wage dynamics: Evidence from the Mexican Peso crisis By Joan Monràs
  2. Life after Crossing the Border: Assimilation during the First Mexican Mass Migration By David Escamilla-Guerrero; Edward Kosack; Zachary Ward
  3. Health of Elderly Parents, Their Children's Labor Supply, and the Role of Migrant Care Workers By Wolfgang Frimmel; Martin Halla; Jörg Paetzold; Julia Schmieder
  4. Intergenerational Transfers by Size and Wealth Inequality in Rich Countries By , Stone Center; Nolan, Brian; Palomino, Juan; Van Kerm, Philippe; Morelli, Salvatore

  1. By: Joan Monràs
    Abstract: How does the US labor market absorb low-skilled immigration? I address this question using the 1995 Mexican Peso Crisis, an exogenous push factor that raised Mexican migration to the US. In the short run, high-immigration locations see their low-skilled labor force increase and native low-skilled wages decrease, with an implied inverse local labor demand elasticity of at least -.7. Mexican immigration also leads to an increase in the relative price of rentals. Internal relocation dissipates this shock spatially. In the long run, the only lasting consequences are a) lower wages and employment rates for low-skilled natives who entered the labor force in high-immigration years, and b) lower housing prices in high-immigrant locations, since Mexican immigrant workers disproportionately enter the construction sector and lower construction costs. I use a quantitative dynamic spatial equilibrium many-region model to obtain the counterfactual local wage evolution absent the immigration shock, to study the role of local technology adoption in generating wage dynamics, to analyze the role of unilateral state level immigrant restrictive laws, and to study the role of housing markets
    Keywords: International and internal migration, local shocks, local labor demand elasticity, local housing markets.
    JEL: F22 J20 J30
    Date: 2019–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:upf:upfgen:1745&r=all
  2. By: David Escamilla-Guerrero; Edward Kosack; Zachary Ward
    Abstract: The first mass migration of Mexicans to the United States occurred in the early twentieth century: from smaller pre-Revolutionary flows in the 1900s, to hundreds of thousands during the violent 1910s, to the boom of the 1920s, and then the bust and deportations/repatriations of the 1930s. We show that despite these large shifts, the rate of economic assimilation was remarkably similar across arrival cohorts. We find that the average Mexican immigrant held a lower-paying job than US-born whites near arrival and further fell behind in the following decade. However, Mexican assimilation was not uniquely slow since we also find that the average Italian immigrant fell behind at a similar rate. Yet, conditional on geography, human capital, and initial earning score, Mexicans had a slower growth rate than both US-born whites and Italians. We argue that Mexican-specific structural barriers help to explain why Mexican progress was slower than other groups and why different Mexican arrival cohorts had limited variation in outcomes despite the large shocks to migration.
    Keywords: assimilation, immigration, Mexico, mobility, mob violence
    JEL: J15 J61 J62 N31 N32
    Date: 2020–10–05
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oxf:esohwp:_183&r=all
  3. By: Wolfgang Frimmel; Martin Halla; Jörg Paetzold; Julia Schmieder
    Abstract: We estimate the impact of parental health on adult children’s labor market outcomes. We focus on health shocks which increase care dependency abruptly. Our estimation strategy exploits the variation in the timing of shocks across treated families. Empirical results based on Austrian administrative data show a significant negative impact on labor market activities of children. This effect is more pronounced for daughters and for children who live close to their parents. Further analyses suggest informal caregiving as the most likely mechanism. The effect is muted after a liberalization of the formal care market, which sharply increased the supply of foreign care workers.
    Keywords: Informal care, formal care, aging, health, labor supply, labor migration
    JEL: J14 J22 I11 I18 R23
    Date: 2020
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp1902&r=all
  4. By: , Stone Center (The Graduate Center/CUNY); Nolan, Brian; Palomino, Juan; Van Kerm, Philippe; Morelli, Salvatore
    Abstract: This paper uses household wealth surveys to compare patterns of intergenerational wealth transfers across six rich countries and assess the relationships between transfers, current levels of net wealth, and wealth inequality. The paper examines four Euro Area countries, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain and extends the systematic comparison to the US and the UK. It finds that many of those currently at the top of the wealth distribution did not benefit from intergenerational transfers, but those who did received particularly large amounts while those toward the bottom of the wealth distribution received very little. A substantial gap in net wealth is seen between those who received or did not receive some wealth transfer. Controlling for age, gender, education and household size reduces the size of that gap but it remains substantial, especially in the US. We further look at how a marginal increase in the proportion of recipients of transfers of differing sizes would contribute to the shape of the overall wealth distribution using influence function regressions. Crucially, we show that the impact depends not only on the locations in the wealth distributions of recipients versus non-recipients, but also on the size of the receipt, an aspect which has been overlooked to date. In most countries, increasing the proportion of recipients of large transfers generally increases overall wealth inequality. In contrast, having more recipients of small or medium- sized transfers would be expected to reduce wealth inequality modestly, as they are more concentrated around the middle of the wealth distribution than non-recipients. (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality Working Paper)
    Date: 2020–09–17
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:eyh8s&r=all

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