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Research on the wage and employment impact of refugees shows modest or no harmful effects on native workers

21 July 2017

Sudden inflows of refugees have been shown to have little or no impact on native wages, but recent research has challenged this consensus, using instrumental variables to show uniformly large detrimental effects. This column argues that these new results were due to problems with the strategy used and, in the case of the Mariel boatlift, the composition of the sample. Correcting for these flaws, the impact of immigration on average native-born workers remains small and inconsistent, with no evidence to show a large detrimental impact on less-educated workers.

Related links

Jennifer Hunt, Rutgers and Visiting Academic to CEP:  http://economics.rutgers.edu/people/296-hunt-jennifer

 

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