GEP Research Paper 01/28
The Employment and Wage Effects of Immigration: Trade and Labour Economics Perspectives
Noel Gaston and Doug Nelson
This paper was subsequently published in Trade, Investment and Labour: Proceedings of IEA Conference, D. Greenaway, R. Upward and K. Wakelin (eds.), Pagrave (2002).
Abstract
This paper presents a detailed survey of results from current research on the labour market effects of immigration. It argues: 1) that econometric research uniformly finds very small labour market effects of immigration; 2) that labour and trade economists have differed in their interpretation of this finding; and 3) that this difference is driven exclusively by different dimensionality assumptions (with labour economists preferring a 1-sector x m-factor model and trade economists an n-sector x m-factor model). It is then argued that the trade economists' model; along with its presumption of factor-price insensitivity is the more useful as a presumption generator.
Issued in November 2001.
This paper is available in PDF format .