Immigration, Job Sorting, and Health: Evidence from 1920s United States Quotas - R&R at Journal of Health Economics
Presented at: PAA 2025, Sixth World Labor Conference AASLE/SOLE/EALE
This project examines how an exogenous decline in immigration flows induces sorting across the distribution of health conditions in the local labor market adjustment process and documents significant changes in the community health indicators. In the 1920s, a set of immigration laws in the United States imposed quotas based on national origin and restricted immigrant flows. These policies cut immigration flows from constrained countries to around 150,000 individuals a year. The effects of this policy change are identified in a difference-in-difference framework utilizing the LIFE-M, historical labor survey, and full count census data. Results indicate that individuals in areas facing larger declines in immigration are observed transitioning into occupations and industries with worse associated health measures. Increasing native-born employment in high health cost (HHC) positions offset lost immigrant labor leading to no change in HHC employment share. Further, policy exposure was associated with declining average lifespan and increasing mortality rates among counties’ working age US-born population.
Closing the Door, Shrinking the Cradle: Immigration Quotas and Fertility Decline (with Osea Giuntella and Rania Gihleb)
Presented at: NBER 2025 Workshop on Fertility and Declining Population Growth in High-Income Countries
In this paper, we study the impact of immigration on native demographic behavior by exploring the effect of the quotas the United States imposed in the 1920s. Using a difference-in-difference approach and US Census data from 1900 to 1930, we find that the decline in immigration led to a decline in marriage rates and an increase in the share of young adults living with their parents. The quotas led to a decline in fertility, particularly among young women. Conditional on having children, we find that mothers in high-exposure areas had more children on average. However, the extensive margin decline in childbearing outweighed this, resulting in an overall net decline in fertility. Consistent with previous evidence on the economic effects of quotas, we observe no significant change in women’s labor force participation rates. However, the quotas reduced the proportion of women employed in childcare, particularly among younger workers, leading to an aging childcare workforce. The ratio of children to childcare workers declined for younger workers but increased for older ones, likely raising the cost and reducing the availability of childcare. These labor market changes exacerbated the logistical challenges of childrearing and contributed to the observed fertility decline.
Senior Internal Migration and US Labor Markets (slides)
This paper examines the effects of the internal migration of seniors within the United States on labor markets. From 2000 to 2019, the share of internal migrants who are retired increased by 50%, driven by declining mobility among younger cohorts and declining age cohort size. I use a difference-in-difference design and novel shift-share instrument to identify the causal effect of variation in these flows on wages, labor market activity, and industrial specialization. I find that senior migration flows drive significant wage divergence and industrial specialization across labor markets. I estimate a wage elasticity between 0.1 and 0.3 associated with a 1% increase in the share of the adult population in an area who are internally migrated seniors. These results suggest that long-running demographic trends have reshaped the internal economy and (with these trends projected to continue into the 2040s) will continue to do so.
Quiet Gains: Infrastructure, Noise Reduction, and Health (with Osea Giuntella and Niklas Rott)
We examine the health impacts of large-scale noise abatement infrastructure using longitudinal data linked to the timing of noise-barrier construction at the ZIP-code level. Our design exploits the staggered rollout of highway noise barriers as plausibly exogenous reductions in environmental noise exposure. We define treatment status based on the completion of at least one barrier within a ZIP code and estimate dynamic effects on individual health outcomes using an event-study difference-in-differences framework. This approach allows us to trace changes in physical and mental health before and after construction while testing for pre-trends and the persistence of effects over time. By combining detailed administrative records on infrastructure investments with rich longitudinal health data, the study provides new causal evidence on how improvements in the built environment shape population well-being.
Capital Destruction and Immigration: Evidence from Colombian Earthquakes (w/ Leonardo Urrea Rios)