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The United States has long been perceived as a land of opportunity for immigrants. Yet, both in the past and today, US natives have expressed concern that immigrants fail to integrate into US society and lower wages for existing workers. This paper reviews the literatures on historical and contemporary migrant flows, yielding new insights on migrant selection, assimilation of immigrants into US economy and society, and the effect of immigration on the labor market.

We develop a framework where mismatch between vacancies and job seekers across sectors translates into higher unemployment by lowering the aggregate job-finding rate. We use this framework to measure the contribution of mismatch to the recent rise in US unemployment by exploiting two sources of cross-sectional data on vacancies, JOLTS and HWOL. Our calculations indicate that mismatch, across industries and three-digit occupations, explains at most one-third of the total observed increase in the unemployment rate. Occupational mismatch has become especially more severe for college graduates, and in the West of the United States. Geographical mismatch unemployment plays no apparent role.

In recent decades, cheap labor has played a central role in the Chinese model, which has relied on expanded participation in world trade as a main driver of growth. At the beginning of China's economic reforms in 1978, the annual wage of a Chinese urban worker was only$1,004 in U.S. dollars. The Chinese wage was only 3 percent of the average U.S. wage at that time, and it was also significantly lower than the wages in neighboring Asian countries such as the Philippines and Thailand. The Chinese wage was also low relative to productivity. However, wages are now rising in China. In 2010, the annual wage of a Chinese urban worker reached $ 5,487 in U.S. dollars, which is similar to wages earned by workers in the Philippines and Thailand and significantly higher than those earned by workers in India and Indonesia. China's wages also increased faster than productivity since the late 1990s, suggesting that Chinese labor is becoming more expensive in this sense as well. The increase in China's wages is not confined to any sector, as wages have increased for both skilled and unskilled workers, for both coastal and inland areas, and for both exporting and nonexporting firms. We benchmark wage growth to productivity growth using both national- and industry-level data, showing that Chinese labor was kept cheap until the late 1990s but the relative cost of labor has increased since then. Finally, we discuss the main forces that are pushing wages up.

This article casts light on the increasingly complex geography of innovation and knowledge sourcing activities. We argue that the spatial patterns of learning and knowledge exchange vary substantially across different types of regions and industries. The article elucidates such variations by combining three analytical approaches, namely, (i) modes of innovation (differentiating between science-technology-innovation (STI) and doing-using-interacting (DUI) modes), (ii) regional innovation systems (distinguishing between organizationally thick and diversified, thick and specialized, and thin systems), and (iii) types of knowledge linkages that connect actors during the innovation process. We explore in detail the key characteristics of the spatial architectures of innovation and knowledge flows in STI and DUI industries located in regional innovation systems with varying degrees of organizational thickness and specialization. We also discuss empirical examples documented in the extant literature to illustrate our arguments on how innovation and knowledge circulation unfold in space in various territorial and industrial contexts.

We investigate whether the degree production and R&D activities of colleges and universities are related to the amount and types of human capital in the metropolitan areas where they are located. Our results indicate only a small positive relationship exists between a metropolitan area’s production and stock of human capital, suggesting that migration plays an important role in the geographic distribution of human capital. We also find that academic R&D activities increase local human capital levels, suggesting that spillovers from such activities can raise the demand for human capital. Consistent with these results, we show that metropolitan areas with more higher education activity tend to have a larger share of workers in high human capital occupations. Thus, this research indicates that colleges and universities can raise local human capital levels by increasing both the supply of and demand for skill.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, ethnic Germans living in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were given the opportunity to migrate to Germany. Within 15 years, 2.8 million individuals had done so. Upon arrival, these immigrants were exogenously allocated to different regions to ensure an even distribution across the country. Their inflow can therefore be seen as a quasi-experiment of immigration. I analyze the effect of these inflows on skill-specific employment rates and wages. The results indicate a displacement effect of 3.1 unemployed workers for every 10 immigrants that find a job, but no effect on relative wages.

Costa and Kahn (2000, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115: 1287–1315) documented that power couples tended to be located in large cities, postulating a need to solve a co-location problem peculiar to dual-career, highly educated spouses. Using data from the 2008 to 2014 American Community Surveys, I find that young full-power couples are more likely to move to larger, better-educated cities relative to couples in which just the husband has a college degree and wife-only power couples more likely than couples in which neither spouse has a college degree. I also present new evidence that larger, better-educated cities offer superior joint husband-and-wife career outcomes as measured by occupational attainment for wives and husbands with college degrees.

The authors study the sources of match-specific value at large U.S. law firms by analyzing how graduates of law schools group into law firms. They measure the degree to which lawyers from certain schools concentrate within certain firms and then analyze how this agglomeration can be explained by \"natural advantage\" factors (such as geographic proximity) and by productive complementarities across graduates of a given school. Large law firms tend to hire from a select group of law schools, and individual offices within these firms are substantially more concentrated in terms of hires from particular schools. The degree of concentration is highly variable, as there is substantial variation in firms' hiring strategies. Two main drivers of variation in law school concentration occur within law offices. First, geography drives a large amount of concentration, as most firms hire largely from local schools, Second, school-based networks (and possibly productive complementarities) appear to be important because partners' law schools drive associates' law school composition even when controlling for firm, school, and firm/school match characteristics and when instrumenting for partners' law schools.

This article studies the consequences of restrictions to migration at the origin on labor market outcomes and school enrolment in origin communities. Our difference-in-differences specification exploits the differential impact across districts in Indonesia of a reform that restricted the migration of Indonesian female domestic workers towards Saudi Arabia in 2011. Our results suggest that this reform did not lead to higher unemployment in Indonesia, but it increased the proportion of workers employed in informal jobs and in agriculture. No detectable change in the consumption patterns of Indonesian households appears from our analysis, suggesting that rural areas in Indonesia could absorb the sudden increase in the availability of workforce. Our findings also show an increase in junior secondary school enrolment of both males and females, arguably reflecting the importance of the maternal presence in the household for the investment in human capital of children.

This paper investigates the gender wage gap for full-time formal sector employees, disaggregated by education level. The gap between the labor force participation rate of women with tertiary education and those with lower levels of education is substantial. There is no such gap for men. Hence, existing gender wage gap studies for Turkey, where we observe lopsided labor force participation rates by education levels, compare two very different populations. We disaggregate the whole sample by education level to create more homogenous sub-groups. For Turkey, without disaggregation, the gender wage gap was 13% in 2011, and women are significantly over-qualified relative to men on observed characteristics. Once we disaggregate the sample by education level, we show that the gender wage gap is 24% for less educated women and 9% for women with tertiary education in full-time formal employment. Observed characteristics only explain 1 % of this gap in absolute terms. We further disaggregate the data by public and private employment. The gender gap is higher in the private sector. However, women with tertiary education in the public sector are significantly better qualified compared to men, and consequently the adjusted gender wage gap is higher for women with tertiary education in the public sector. Our estimates also indicate a rise in the gender wage gap between 2004 and 2011.