Herd Effects or Migration Networks? The Location Choice of Mexican Immigrants in the U.S.

By Thomas K. Bauer, Gil S. Epstein, Ira N. Gang. Social Science Research Network, 2002

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper addresses the question: Why and where do immigrants cluster? We examine the relative importance and interaction of two alternative explanations of immigrant clustering: (1) network externalities and (2) herd behavior. We advance the theory by presenting a framework encompassing both network and herd effects, and by delineating various types of network and herd effects in our empirical work. In order to distinguish between herd and network externalities, we use the Mexican Migration Project data. Our empirical results show that both network externalities and herds have significant effects on the migrant's decision of where to migrate. Moreover, the significance and size of the effects vary according to the legal status of the migrant and whether the migrant is a "new" or a "repeat" migrant. The network-externality effect has an inverse U shape, not simply a linear positive effect as often presented in the literature. Neglecting herds and/or networks, or the inverse U shape of network effects leads to faulty conclusions about migrant behavior.

Subfields: Demography, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ab43f1987072a6ae7310108eabea34f411ac17a3

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Citations in the corpus

Determinants of recent immigrants’ location choices: quasi-experimental evidence (2009, background): “…evidence in favour of each of these theories exists, see e.g. Bauer et al. (2002a) for supportive evidence of the ethnic network theory, Chiswick and Miller (2005) for empirical evidence of the ethnic goods theory and Bauer et al. (2002b) for empirical validation of the herd effects theory.”
Green Cards and the Location Choices of Immigrants in the United States, 1971-2000 (2006, background): “Past research (e.g. Bartel, 1989; Jaeger, 2000; Bauer et al., 2002) has shown that concentrations of similar immigrants are important determinants of location choice.”
Enclaves, language, and the location choice of migrants (2002, background): “DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES Available online at: www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP3527.asp and http://ssrn.com/abstract_id=337620 www.ssrn.com/xxx/xxx/xxx No. 3527 ENCLAVES, LANGUAGE AND THE LOCATION CHOICE OF MIGRANTS Thomas Bauer, Gil S Epstein and Ira Gang LABOUR ECONOMICS ISSN 0265-8003 ENCLAVES, LANGUAGE…”
Skilled Migration: The Perspective of Developing Countries (2004, unknown): “Migration networks can then be viewed as reducing the costs, and perhaps also increasing the bene…ts of migration (Bauer et al., 2002, Munshi, 2003, and McKenzie and Rapoport, 2007, …nd strong evidence of such network e¤ects).”
Migrants’ Remittances and Financial Development: Macro‐ and Micro‐Level Evidence of a Perverse Relationship (2013, background): “A network variable seeks to capture chain migration effects observed in studies such as Bauer et al. (2002); Epstein and Gang (2006).”
Selection and network effects—Migration flows into OECD countries 1990–2000 (2008, background): “Nevertheless, immigration flows may not stop even if the immigration creates negative externalities, see Epstein (2002), Bauer et al. (2002) and Heitmueller (2003).”
Selection or Network Effects? Migration Flows into 27 OECD Countries, 1990-2000 (2004, background): “Nevertheless, immigration flows may not stop even if the immigration creates negative externalities, see Epstein (2002), Bauer et al. (2002) and Heitmueller (2003).”
Self-Selection Patterns in Mexico-U.S. Migration: The Role of Migration Networks (2010, background): “1 Indeed, Bauer et al. (2005) show that enclaves selectively attract people with limited language skills while all else equal migrants with better host-country language proficiency choose destinations with smaller home-country networks.”