Monday Smackdown: George Borjas P-Hacking His Way Along...
How George Borjas p-hacked his way to his conclusion that immigrants have big negative effects on native-worker wages: Jennifer Hunt and Michael Clemens: Refugees have little effect on native worker wages: "Card (1990) found that a large inflow of Cubans to Miami in 1980 did not affect native wages or unemployment...
...Hunt (1992)... a large inflow from Algeria to France.... Friedberg (2001) found that a large inflow of post-Soviet Jews to Israel between 1990 and 1994.... Recent studies have challenged these results by re-analysing all four of these refugee waves. This new wave of research claims that earlier work obscured uniformly large, detrimental effects, either by aggregating the affected workers with unaffected workers (Borjas 2017) or through inadequate causal identification (Borjas and Monras 2017), or both.... We find that, for all four refugee waves, the methods used in the recent re-analyses were subject to substantial bias. Correcting these biases largely eliminates the disagreement between the new and old findings...
I'm with Card on this one, very strongly. It's long past time to give this a rest...
#shouldread
