Migrant Networks and Trade: The Vietnamese Boat People as a Natural Experiment

By Christopher A. Parsons, Pierre-Louis Vézina. Social Science Research Network, 2018

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We provide cogent evidence for the causal pro-trade effect of migrants and in doing so establish an important link between migrant networks and long-run economic development. To this end, we exploit a unique event in human history, the exodus of the Vietnamese Boat People to the US. This episode represents an ideal natural experiment as the large immigration shock, the first wave of which comprised refugees exogenously allocated across the US, occurred over a twenty-year period during which time the US imposed a complete trade embargo on Vietnam. Following the lifting of trade restrictions in 1994, the share of US exports going to Vietnam was higher and more diversified in those US States with larger Vietnamese populations, themselves the result of larger refugee inflows 20 years earlier.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/332ad55b7b06dcd967a2deeb38d07eac37b45e97

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Citations in the corpus

Immigration, Trade and Productivity in Services: Evidence from U.K. Firms (2018, methodology): “Recently Steingress (2015), Cohen et al. (2015) and Parsons and Vezina (2016) have used sharper identi(cid:133)cation strategies, based on the dispersion of refugees, the scattering of Japanese in Internment camps during World War II and the distribution of Vietnamese refugees in the 1970(cid:146)s…”
Natural Experiments in Macroeconomics (2015, unknown): “Subject to this assumption, Parsons and Vezina’s main specification implies that a doubling of the population share of Vietnamese migrants relative to the mean increases the ratio of exports to Vietnam over GDP by 19.8%. Cohen, Gurun, and Malloy (2014) instead use the forced relocation of ethnic Jap”