Research

While my primary research focus is the economic impact of immigration, I would classify myself as an applied microeconomist with a variety of research interests in Labor Economics, Urban/Regional Economics, and Industrial Organization.

Dissertation:

1. "Re-Evaluating the Impact of Immigration on the U.S. Rental Housing Market" (Job Market Paper)

The existing literature examining the impact of immigration on the housing market suggests that annual immigrant inflows equal to 1% of the total population increase housing rents by as much as 1%. While one would expect a one-time population shift to increase housing demand, this increase in prices seems implausibly large. In this essay, I show that past results are overstated due to specification error. With a correctly specified model, the impact of immigration on rents decreases by around 80% and is not statistically different from zero. The upward bias of previous estimates is attributed to the shift-share instrumental variable strategy, which fails to properly identify a causal impact of immigration on rents due to the positive correlation between city attributes, housing prices, and both past and present immigrant location decisions. The implications are potentially far-reaching as this empirical strategy is widely used in the immigration literature. Lastly, I address the impact of immigration on the affordability of rental housing. Again, using a correctly specified model, the results suggest immigration has had no discernible impact on housing affordability. In fact, I find a negative correlation between immigrant inflows and changes in the rent-to-income ratio, which is taken as evidence that immigrants are simply locating in thriving cities where both housing prices and wages are increasing. Overall, I conclude that we should not expect immigrant inflows to have a differential impact on housing prices relative to overall growth in housing demand.

2. "Immigration and Native Wages: A New Look" (Working Paper)

Although labor economic theory would suggest that immigration should have negative impacts on native wages and/or employment outcomes, a consensus has not emerged in the existing literature. Traditionally, it is assumed that labor market competition occurs within the broadly defined education-experience cohorts. However, due to underplacement and the undervaluation of education earned outside of the U.S., it is shown that immigrants and natives do not directly compete in the labor market within education groups. As such, I take a new approach where labor market cohorts are defined by occupation instead of education. Occupation skill groups are defined using skill data from the O*NET database, focusing specifically on communicative and manual skills (Peri and Sparber, 2009). This paper provides several contributions to the existing literature on immigration and native wags. First, this is the first attempt in the immigration literature (known to the author) to segment the labor market based on occupation groups defined by occupational skill sets. Second, the results confirm that immigrants and natives are perfect substitutes within occupation-experience cohorts. Third, it is shown, using both reduced form and structural estimation, that immigration does have significant impacts on native wages and these impacts are nearly twice as large as those found in the most optimistic studies using education to define skill groups.

3. "Immigration and Rental Housing: A Quantile Regression Approach" (In Progress)

It is well known that recent immigrant inflows have become less and less skilled relative to past immigrant inflows. This fact is due, in part, to the changes in immigration policy and differences in the makeup of immigrant inflows which has seen more low-skilled immigration from Central and South America. Furthermore, it is well-known that the skill distribution of immigrants is more "polarized" than that of natives. That is, the majority of immigrants are either low-skilled or high-skilled, with few immigrants in the middle of the distribution. As such, one may expect immigration to have a nonlinear effect on housing prices. Assuming that skill and/or wage distributions mirror rent distributions, it is likely that any immigration-induced housing demand shock will be concentrated on the lowest and highest priced rental properties. This paper uses an instrumental variable quantile regression approach to analyze this fact. To my knowledge, this is the first attempt to estimate this nonlinear impact of immigration within the context of the housing market. Preliminary results confirm the intuition above that the impact of immigration, while small on average, is significantly higher for the lowest cost rental units. This result has significant implications for policymakers as low-cost rentals are typically occupied by low-wage individuals who can ill afford even small changes in housing prices.