PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Giovanni Peri
AU  - Vasil Yasenov
TI  - The Labor Market Effects of a Refugee Wave
AID  - 10.3368/jhr.54.2.0217.8561R1
DP  - 2019 Mar 31
TA  - Journal of Human Resources
PG  - 267--309
VI  - 54
IP  - 2
4099  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/54/2/267.short
4100  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/54/2/267.full
SO  - J Hum Resour2019 Mar 31; 54
AB  - We apply the synthetic control method to reexamine the labor market effects of the Mariel Boatlift, first studied by David Card (1990). This method improves on previous studies by choosing a control group of cities that best matches Miami’s labor market trends pre-Boatlift and providing more reliable inference. Using a sample of non-Cuban high school dropouts we find no significant difference in the wages of workers in Miami relative to its control after 1980. We also show that by focusing on small subsamples and matching the control group on a short pre-1979 series, as done in Borjas (2017), one can find large wage differences between Miami and the control because of large measurement error.