In two recent publications, Abdurrahman Aydemir looks at the impact of immigration policies on the characteristics of immigrants and the impact of immigration on the receiving country labor markets.
His Journal of Population Economics (24:451–475) paper assesses the efficacy of immigrant selection based on skill requirements. This system is high on the agenda of immigrant receiving countries as competition for highly skilled workers increase worldwide. Abdurrahman’s paper documents in the Canadian context that skill based immigrants have much more favorable human capital characteristics compared to other types of immigrants and discusses the mechanism that generates this outcome. However, due to difficulties in transfer of foreign human capital, they do not necessarily perform better in the labor market and important factors used to assess admissibility have very limited power to predict short-term labor market success.
Abdurrahman also published in the Journal of Labor Economics (29, 1: 69-112), co-authored by George Borjas, a study of the labor market impacts of immigration. Although economic theory predicts an inverse relation between relative wages and immigration induced supply shifts, it has been very difficult to document such effects in previous studies. Abdurrahman’s paper shows that the weak evidence may be partly due to sampling error in a commonly used measure of supply shift and correcting for the resulting bias can substantially increase existing estimates of the wage impacts of immigration. Winner of the best paper award in the 2011 Economic Research Forum conference with “The Impact of Repatriates from Bulgaria on the Turkish Labor Market” and recipient of TUBA GEBIP award 2009, Abdurrahman is a leading Turkish labor economist.
