
Economics and Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-2018
Abstract
Flows of US immigrants are concentrated at the extremes of the skill distribution. We develop a dynamic political economy model consistent with this observation. Individuals care about wages and the welfare of their children. Skill types are complementary in production. Voter support for immigration requires that the children of median-voter natives and of immigrants have sufficiently dissimilar skills. We estimate intergenerational transition matrices for skills, as measured by education, and find support for immigration at high and low skills, but not in the middle. In a version with guest worker programs, voters prefer high-skilled immigrants but low-skilled guest workers.
Recommended Citation
Bohn, H. and Lopez-Velasco, A.R., 2018. Intergenerational mobility and the political economy of immigration. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 94, pp.72-88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jedc.2018.07.005
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jedc.2018.07.005
Comments
Original published version available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jedc.2018.07.005