Immigration and the Neighborhood

By Albert Saiz, Susan M. Wachter. Social Science Research Network, 2006

263 citations recorded by the source corpus.

What impact does immigration have on neighborhood dynamics? Within metropolitan areas, we find that housing values have grown relatively more slowly in neighborhoods of immigrant settlement. We propose three nonexclusive explanations: changes in housing quality, reverse causality, or the hypothesis that natives find immigrant neighbors relatively less attractive (native flight). To instrument for the actual number of new immigrants, we deploy a geographic diffusion model that predicts the number of new immigrants in a neighborhood using lagged densities of the foreign-born in surrounding neighborhoods. Subject to the validity of our instruments, the evidence is consistent with a causal interpretation of an impact from growing immigration density to native flight and relatively slower housing price appreciation. Further evidence indicates that these results may be driven more by the demand for residential segregation based on race and education than by foreignness per se.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9f61144074cc54fbb5c16713d6a3dfa4c396d626

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Citations in the corpus

On Local Housing Supply Elasticity (2008, background): “Moreover, housing prices are important determinants and consequences of urban dynamics, from urban form (Alonso, 1972) and segregation (Saiz and Wachter, 2006 and references therein), to the capitalization of local taxes (Oates, 1969, Poterba, 1992, Hoxby and Kumzciemko, 2005), amenities (Chay and…”
The wider economic impacts of high-skilled migrants: a survey of the literature for receiving countries (2013, unknown): “13 areas (Saiz 2011; Saiz and Wachter 2011).”
Economic Impacts of Immigration: A Survey (2011, background): “Lach (2007) studied the massive in ow of Russian Jewish immigrants into Israel 20On the other hand, Saiz and Wachter (2010) found that growth in immigrants at the neighborhood-level within cities was associated with lower housing price appreciation.”
Gifts of the Immigrants, Woes of the Natives: Lessons from the Age of Mass Migration (2019, unknown): “45This idea is consistent with findings of several papers for both Europe and the US today (e.g. Card et al., 2012; Saiz and Wachter, 2011).”