A new AER paper uses a cross‑county, ancestry‑by‑inflow identification strategy to isolate exogenous immigration shocks and finds immigration causally increases local innovation and wages over a five‑year horizon. Its structural model estimates that immigration to the United States since 1965 may have raised aggregate innovation and wages by about 5 percent.
— If robust, this quantifies a positive long‑run economic effect of immigration and sharpens arguments about the costs and benefits of immigration policy.
Reem Nadeem
2026.03.25
85% relevant
The piece documents 70+ million immigrant arrivals and a tripling of the foreign‑born share since 1970 — a concrete demographic fact that underpins claims that immigration has been a major force for labor‑supply, regional growth and innovation, linking the article's evidence to the idea about immigration's economic effects.
Alex Tabarrok
2026.03.24
80% relevant
The article cites an NBER paper showing large U.S. physician pay premiums and notes an estimate that immigrants account for ~32% of U.S. innovation, using that evidence to argue that immigrant inflows (and stronger education) relieve a shortage of high‑skill workers and thus help explain high wages for physicians and other top skilled occupations.
Tyler Cowen
2026.03.21
85% relevant
Cowen’s report documents that Canadian‑born residents in the U.S. are disproportionately educated, clustered in top income deciles, and that a large share of would‑be top earners left Canada (≈40% of potential top 1%), directly supporting the existing idea that skilled immigration raises U.S. wages and innovation while depressing origin‑country averages.
Tyler Cowen
2026.03.06
100% relevant
Stephen J. Terry et al., American Economic Review paper (summarized in Marginal Revolution) reporting the ancestry × inflow identification strategy and the 5% historical effect estimate.