Migrants, Ancestors, and Investments
Thomas Chaney,
Konrad Burchardi () and
Tarek Hassan
No 11025, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers
Abstract:
We use 130 years of data on historical migrations to the United States to show a causal effect of the ancestry composition of US counties on foreign direct investment (FDI) sent and received by local firms. To isolate the causal effect of ancestry on FDI, we build a simple reduced-form model of migrations: migrations from a foreign country to a US county at a given time depend on (i) a push factor, causing emigration from that foreign country to the entire United States, and (ii) a pull factor, causing immigration from all origins into that US county. The interaction between time-series variation in country-specific push factors and county-specific pull factors generates quasi-random variation in the allocation of migrants across US counties. We find that a doubling of the number of residents with ancestry from a given foreign country relative to the mean increases by 4.2 percentage points the probability that at least one local firm invests in that country, and increases by 31% the number of employees at domestic recipients of FDI from that country. The size of these effects increases with the ethnic diversity of the local population, the geographic distance to the origin country, and the ethno-linguistic fractionalization of the origin country.
Keywords: Foreign direct investment; International trade; Migrations; Networks; Social ties (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J61 L14 O11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-gro and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)
Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11025 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
Related works:
Working Paper: Migrants, Ancestors, and Investments (2016)
Working Paper: Migrants, Ancestors, and Investments (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11025
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11025
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().