The Economic Payoff of Immigrant Diversity in Cities: Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee Data

长期以来，科学家们一直对移民和经济福利之间的关系感兴趣。与此同时，学术界内外的大多数讨论都集中在移民的整体上，或者是技术移民和非技术移民。人们对移民带来的多样性的成本和收益知之甚少：出生在不同国家的工人越来越多。该项目通过分析美国大都市地区移民多样性的经济意义来填补这一空白。它将考虑多样性如何使不同个体之间的互动，产生新的，有价值的想法和提高生产力；同样，它将探讨在高度多样化的城市环境中进行交易的挑战是否会限制合作，从而降低生产率。在关于移民及其所带来的复杂文化环境的辩论中，人们大多认为外国出生的工人取代了本地人。因此，日益增长的多样性被描绘成一场零和游戏。但本项目考虑的可能性是，出生在不同国家的工人可以相互补充，而不是相互替代，他们的集体异质性为所有人带来经济利益。这项研究的结果将有助于重新定义这一问题，并提高学术界和政策团体对城市移民多样性可能产生的经济效益的理解。该项目将以现有的地理学和经济学研究为基础，研究美国人口普查局极其丰富的机密数据，这些数据追踪了1992年至2008年期间大量美国工人及其工作场所的季度数据。通过利用工人、公司和城市特征随时间的变化，这些数据将使结果比目前的知识状态更准确、更广泛地推广。此外，研究人员不仅要考虑总体影响，还要考虑多样性对不同技能水平、不同行业、不同社会和政策背景下的工人可能产生的不同影响。该项目还将厘清所观察到的多样性效应是来自公司内部的互动，还是来自城市更广阔的空间。简而言之，调查人员将提供有关城市移民多样性对经济影响的最佳信息。

Scientists have long been interested in the relationship between immigration and economic welfare. At the same time, most of the discussion in and out of academia focuses on immigrants as a whole, or in terms of skilled and unskilled immigrants. Much less is known about the costs and benefits of immigrant-spawned diversity: the growing mix of workers born in different countries. This project fills this gap by analyzing the economic significance of immigrant diversity in U.S. metropolitan areas. It will consider how diversity enables interactions among different individuals, generating new, valuable ideas and raising productivity; equally, it will explore whether the challenges of transacting in a highly diverse urban environment can limit cooperation, thereby reducing productivity. In debates over immigration and the culturally complex environments it engenders, it is mostly assumed that foreign-born workers displace natives. Rising diversity is thus cast as a zero-sum game. But this project considers the possibility that workers born in different countries can be complements, not substitutes, with their collective heterogeneity generating economic benefits for all. Findings from this research will help to reframe this issue and improve understanding within academic and policy communities regarding the economic benefits that urban immigrant diversity may engender.This project will build on existing work in geography and economics by examining extremely rich confidential U.S. Census Bureau data that track a vast number of U.S. workers and the establishments in which they work on a quarterly basis between 1992 and 2008. By exploiting changes in worker, firm and city characteristics over time, these data will allow results that are more accurate and more widely generalizable than the current state of knowledge. Moreover, the researchers will consider not just overall effects, but also how diversity may differently affect workers at different skill levels, in different industries, and in different social and policy contexts. This project will also disentangle whether any observed diversity effects come from interactions within firms or in the broader space of the city. In short, the investigators will produce the best available information on the economic implications of immigrant diversity in cities.