Publications by Author: Hatton, Timothy J.

2009
Hatton, Timothy J, and Jeffery G Williamson. 2009. “Vanishing Third World Emigrants?”. Abstract
This paper documents a stylized fact not well appreciated in the literature. The Third World has been undergoing an emigration life cycle since the 1960s, and, except for Africa, emigration rates have been level or even declining since a peak in the late 1980s the early 1990s. The current economic crisis will serve only to accelerate those trends. The paper estimates the economic and demographic fundamentals driving these Third World emigration life cycles to the United States since 1970—the income gap between the US and the sending country, the education gap between the US and the sending country, the poverty trap, the size of the cohort at risk, and migrant stock dynamics. It then projects the life cycle up to 2024. The projections imply that pressure on Third World emigration over the next two decades will not increase. It also suggests that future US immigrants will be blacker and fewer will speak Spanish.
2007
Williamson, Jeffery G, and Timothy J Hatton. 2007. “The Impact of Immigration: Comparing Two Global Eras”. Abstract
This paper asks whether history can inform modern debate about immigration’s impact on high wage economies. It examines the relationship between migration’s labor market impact and capital flows before 1914, the first global era. It then assesses the effects of immigration on wages and employment with and without international capital mobility today, in the second global era. It then explores the links between these economic relationships, welfare burdens, and immigration policy. It concludes with an explanation for the apparent difference in immigration’s impact in the two global eras, and thus on policy.
2006

We live in a world where trade policies are liberal and immigration policies are restrictive. Recent globalization discussions give the impression that this policy difference is a modern phenomenon (Wellisch and Walz 1998; Hillman and Weiss 1999), implying that trade policy was liberal and open a century ago. This conventional view is quite wrong. Instead, while most labor-scarce economies today have open trade and closed immigration policies, a century ago the labor-scarce economies had just the opposite, open immigration and closed trade policies. Thus, the inverse policy correlation has persisted over almost two centuries.

Why have policies towards the movement of labor and goods always been so different in labor-scarce economies? After all, importing labor-intensive products is pretty much like importing labor. So shouldn’t trade and migration policies reinforce each other? Consider for a moment the simple 2×2×2 model in which trade is driven by factor endowments. Furthermore, let us think about the country where labor is relatively scarce since that’s the country for which immigration policies matter. Suppose such a country puts up a tariff to protect the scarce factor, labor. In the absence of immigration, wages will increase. But if labor is allowed to move across borders, the tariff-induced wage increase will be undone by immigration (Mundell 1957). By the same logic, an immigration policy designed to protect domestic labor will be undone by free trade: the desired effect will only be achieved by restricting both trade and immigration. Simple theory predicts that immigration and import restriction should go together. In fact, they never have. Therein lies the policy paradox.

World mass migration began in the early nineteenth century, when advances in transportation technology and industrial revolutions at home enabled increasing numbers of people to set off for other parts of the globe in search of a better life. Two centuries later, there is no distant African, Asian, or Latin American village that is not within reach of some high-wage OECD labor market. This book is the first comprehensive economic assessment of world mass migration taking a long-run historical perspective, including north-north, south-south, and south-north migrations. Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson, both economists and economic historians, consider two centuries of global mobility, assessing its impact on the migrants themselves as well as on the sending and receiving countries.

Global Migration and the World Economy covers two great migration waves: the first, from the 1820s to the beginning of World War I, when immigration was largely unrestricted; the second, beginning in 1950, when mass migration continued to grow despite policy restrictions. The book also explores the period between these two global centuries when world migration shrank sharply because of two world wars, immigration quotas, and the Great Depression. The authors assess the economic performance of these world migrations, the policy reactions to deal with them, and the political economy that connected one with the other. The last third of Global Migration and the World Economy focuses on modern experience and shows how contemporary debates about migration performance and policy can be informed by a comprehensive historical perspective.