Abstract
We estimate the effects of immigration on the annual income and employment levels of native-born construction workers in the US. We utilize a so-called "imperfect instrument approach" formalized by Nevo & Rosen (2012) which allows us to derive an upper bound for the effects of immigration on native-born workers. Our partial identification strategy relies on the assumptions that the imperfect instrument is less correlated with the error term than is our endogenous regressor, but that the sign of the correlation is the same. We find negative and significant effects which indicate that immigration has had a harmful impact on native-born construction workers in the US. Our estimates are upper bounds which means that the true effects are likely larger than those that we find.

Zach Rutledge
Ph.D. Student, Agricultural and Resource Economics

Zach Rutledge studys academic journal articles and other relevant material to understand econometric modelling methodology for immigration-related research, use statistical software to process US Census data (including summary statistics, graphs, and regression analysis), develop econometric models to estimate the effect of immigration on wages and employment levels of construction workers in the US, and write research papers. His work consists of lengthy hours reading complicated economic journal articles, sitting at a computer writing computer code to clean and analyze data, and writing reports and research papers.