Research Papers

“ ‘Dude, Where’s My Job?’ The Impact of Immigration on the Youth Labor Market” (Job Market Paper) [PDF]

Abstract: Most research about the impact of immigration finds limited effects of immigration on native labor market outcomes, but these studies limit their analyses to the adult native population. This paper shows that teen employment is more responsive to immigration than is adult employment, and that growth in low-skilled immigration appears to be an important cause of recent declines in teen employment rates. Using variation in immigrant shares across metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2000, I show that the impact of immigration on youth employment is at least twice as large as the impact on adults, and that immigration affects school enrollment decisions and the type of jobs held by native youth. These effects are strongest for youth most at risk of dropping out of school. The estimates suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in the immigrant share of a city's low-skilled population reduces the teen employment rate by 5 percentage points, implying that up to half of the fall in teen employment between 1990 and 2005 can be explained by increased immigration.