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Borjas, George

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Borjas

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Borjas, George
Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.a41a0f10-b6dc-4799-b9a6-0ad6c0b4ff9e

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    Monopsony, Efficiency, and the Regularization of Undocumented Immigrants
    (Harvard Kennedy School, 2023-07) Borjas, George; Edo, Anthony
    In May 1981, President François Mitterrand regularized the status of undocumented immigrant workers in France. The newly legalized immigrants represented 12 percent of the non-French workforce and about 1 percent of all workers. Employers have monopsony power over undocumented workers because the undocumented may find it costly to participate in the open labor market and have restricted economic opportunities. By alleviating this labor market imperfection, a regularization program can move the market closer to the efficient competitive equilibrium and potentially increase employment and wages for both the newly legalized and the authorized workforce. Our empirical analysis reveals that the Mitterrand regularization program particularly increased employment and wages for low-skill native and immigrant men, and raised French GDP by over 1 percent.
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    The Mismeasurement of Work Time: Implications for Wage Discrimination and Inequality
    (Harvard Kennedy School, 2024-01) Borjas, George; Hamermesh, Daniel S.
    Comparing measures of work time in the recall CPS-ASEC data with contemporaneous measures reveals many logical inconsistencies and probable errors. About 8 percent of ASEC respondents report weeks worked last year that contradict their current work histories in the Basic monthly interviews; the error rate is over 50 percent among workers who move in and out of the workforce. Over 20 percent give contradictory information about whether they usually work a full-time weekly schedule. Part of the inconsistency arises because an increasing fraction of ASEC respondents (over 20 percent by 2018) consists of people whose record was fully imputed. The levels and trends of the errors differ by gender and race, and they affect measured wage differentials between 1978 to 2018. Adjusting for the errors and imputations, gender wage gaps among all workers narrowed by 4 log points more than is commonly reported, and residual wage inequality decreased by 6 log points more. In a very carefully defined sample of full-time year-round workers, gender and racial wage differentials narrowed slightly less than previously estimated using ASEC data, but much more than indicated by commonly used estimates from CPS Outgoing Rotation Groups.
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    The analytics of the wage effect of immigration
    (Springer Science + Business Media, 2013) Borjas, George
    The theory of factor demand has important implications for the study of the impact of immigration on wages. This paper derives the theoretical implications in the context of a general equilibrium model where the wage impact depends on the elasticity of product demand, the rate at which the consumer base expands as immigrants enter the receiving country, the elasticity of supply of capital, and the elasticity of substitution among inputs of production. The constraints imposed by the theory can be used to check the plausibility of the many contradictory claims that appear throughout the immigration literature.
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    Poverty and Program Participation among Immigrant Children
    (Brookings Institution Press, 2011) Borjas, George
    Researchers have long known that poverty in childhood is linked with a range of negative adult socioeconomic outcomes, from lower educational achievement and behavioral problems to lower earnings in the labor market. But few researchers have explored whether exposure to a disadvantaged background affects immigrant children and native children differently. George Borjas uses Current Population Survey (CPS) data on two specific indicators of poverty—the poverty rate and the rate of participation in public assistance programs—to begin answering that question. He finds that immigrant children have significantly higher rates both of poverty and of program participation than do native children.
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    The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians
    (John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2012) Borjas, George; Doran, Kirk
    It has been difficult to open up the black box of knowledge production. We use unique international data on the publications, citations, and affiliations of mathematicians to examine the impact of a large post-1992 influx of Soviet mathematicians on the productivity of their American counterparts. We find a negative productivity effect on those mathematicians whose research overlapped with that of the Soviets. We also document an increased mobility rate (to lower-quality institutions and out of active publishing) and a reduced likelihood of producing “home run” papers. Although the total product of the pre-existing American mathematicians shrank, the Soviet contribution to American mathematics filled in the gap. However, there is no evidence that the Soviets greatly increased the size of the “mathematics pie.” Finally, we find that there are significant international differences in the productivity effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that these international differences can be explained by both differences in the size of the émigré flow into the various countries and in how connected each country is to the global market for mathematical publications.