The Trade-Creating Effect of Immigrants: Evidence from Detailed Purchase Data

10:00-11:30, Tuesday, July 4, 2023

I-206, Boxue Building, DUFE

Dr. Christoph ALBERT is now an Assistant Professor of Economics at Collegio Carlo in Turin, Italy. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2018. His research interests include Macro-labor and urban economics. He has his papers published in Journal of Banking & Finance, American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, The Review of Financial Studies.

We estimate the causal effect of immigrants on imports and explore supply and demand mechanisms. We leverage extremely detailed store- and household-level data on consumption in which we observe the country of origin of purchased products. We isolate the demand channel of immigrants on imports by relying on store-level retail sales data. We do so by assuming that fixed costs of importing a good are invariant across markets within the same retail chain, whereas  preferences for goods vary across markets. Finally, we show evidence that natives benefit from immigrant-induced imports. We examine the nondurable consumption baskets for a sample of native-born households and show that they consume more imports from a given origin country when more immigrants from that country live local to the household.

For more information of the seminar, scan the following QR code(s) to join Tencent QQ group (904 544 292) or WeChat group named "IAER Seminar (4)", please.

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(QR code is valid until 6/7/2023)