Jong-gwan Lee

In this paper, I estimate the short‐run economic effects of the opening of The University of California, Merced in 2005 by comparing Merced with a counterfactual constructed by the synthetic control method. During the period 2005–2014, the opening of the campus has increased local employment by 13%, mainly in nontraded industries, such as the service sector. These findings suggest that a large research university could bring immediate benefits to the local economy because of its large demand fro

We examine the labor market consequences of an extensive campaign repatriating around 400,000 Mexicans in 1929-34. To identify a causal effect, we instrument county level repatriations with the existence of a railway line to Mexico interacted with the size of the Mexican communities in 1910. Using individual linked data we find that Mexican repatriations reduced employment of native incumbent workers and resulted in their occupational downgrading. However, using a repeated cross section of count

During the period 1929-34 a campaign forcing the repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans was carried out in the U.S. by states and local authorities. The claim of politicians at the time was that repatriations would reduce local unemployment and give jobs to Americans, alleviating the local effects of the Great Depression. This paper uses this episode to examine the consequences of Mexican repatriations on labor market outcomes of natives. Analyzing 893 cities using full count decennial C

Abstract This study examines the effects of low-skilled immigration on the wages of native workers by analysing Korea’s temporary immigrant worker programme. Using firm-level survey data, we exploit exogenous variations in the number of foreign workers firms can hire to estimate the wage effects of immigration. We find that an increase in immigrant workers in a firm does not affect the firm-specific native wages, even though both native and immigrant workers mainly work in production jobs. Our r

Abstract We investigate the impact of an increase in immigrant inflows on natives’ residential choices in a large metropolitan city. We utilize an administrative dataset containing information about residential address changes and self-reported reasons for relocation. Exploiting the expansion of a special visa program as an exogenous shock, we find that immigration inflows are both a push and a pull factor for natives. While neighborhoods in Seoul lost more than 6 natives for every 10 additional

Abstract While imperfect substitutability between native and immigrant workers is an important mechanism in estimating the wage effects of immigration, its empirical literature is concentrated on the context of only a few countries. Using occupation task‐intensity data from a unique Korean data set, we demonstrate that relatively skilled native Korean workers respond to increased low‐skilled immigration by pursuing jobs more intensive in communication and cognitive tasks. This native response is