Data and Code for The Labor Market Impact of Immigration: Job Creation vs. Job Competition

This paper studies the labor market effects of both documented and undocumented immigration in a search model featuring non-random hiring. As immigrants accept lower wages, they are preferably chosen by firms and therefore have higher job finding rates than natives, consistent with evidence found in US data. Immigration leads to the creation of additional jobs but also raises competition for natives. Which effect dominates depends on the fall in wage costs, which is larger for undocumented than for legal immigration. The model predicts a dominating job creation effect for the former, reducing natives' unemployment rate, but not for the latter.