job market paper

Migration, Market Power, and Firms - 2026

When firms hold market power over both workers and consumers, migration's effects on welfare look fundamentally different from the canonical labor supply story. I show that migration raises productivity but leaves wages flat, as firms absorb the gain through wider wage markdowns while lower markups redistribute toward consumers. Market power, labor supply, and product demand together govern who wins and loses from migration.

This paper studies how migration affects host economies when firms have market power in both labor and product markets. When firms pay workers below their marginal revenue product and charge prices above marginal cost, migration can reallocate rents across workers, firms, and consumers, so wage changes need not summarize its welfare effects. I examine the Venezuelan exodus to Colombia using confidential firm-level production data that allow me to construct measures of wage markdowns and price markups. A 1 percentage point increase in the local migrant share raises the marginal product of labor by approximately 3 percent and wage markdowns by 5.7 percent, while reducing price markups by 2.4 percent and leaving average wages essentially unchanged. Wage markdowns rise in markets where the shock reduces the value of self-employment, a key outside option for wage workers that disciplines firms' wage-setting power in developing countries, and increase even where no migrant manufacturing workers are measured. The decline in price markups is consistent with demand shifting toward lower-income, more price-sensitive consumers. I develop a general equilibrium model in which firms' labor market power depends on the value of self-employment and poorer consumers are more price-sensitive. I estimate the model on pre-shock cross-sectional moments and validate it against untargeted reduced-form responses to migration. In the model, higher wage markdowns absorb the wage gain from higher productivity. Giving all migrants access to wage employment, formal or informal, nearly eliminates the increase in markdowns and turns a 0.1 percent loss in native real income into a 0.4 percent gain per point of the inflow.

Presented at: Global Migration Center (University of California - Davis, United States); RFBerlin Migration Forum (ROCKWOOL Foundation - Berlin, Germany); 19th International Conference on Migration and Development (Yonsei University - Seoul, South Korea); SOLE Annual Meeting (Denver, Colorado); Spring 2026 Midwest Macroeconomics Meeting (Marquette University - Milwaukee, United States); XXIII RIDGE Forum - LACEA HUMANS Migration Workshop (University of West Indies - Cave Hill, Barbados); 4th Workshop on the Economics of Migration (Universidad Carlos III - Getafe, Spain); IZA@LISER Summer School in Labor Economics 2026 (Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research - Remich, Luxembourg); BSE Summer Forum 2026 (Barcelona School of Economics - Barcelona, Spain); 3rd Cornell Economics Alumni Workshop (Cornell University - Ithaca, United States); 2026 European Association of Labour Economists Conference (UB School of Economics and the Barcelona School of Economics - Barcelona, Spain); Designing Politically Sustainable Immigration Policy (University of Notre Dame - Indiana, United States); Development Seminar (Cornell University- Ithaca, United States); 2026 Northeastern Universities Development Consortium - NEUDC* (Cornell University- Ithaca, United States); Joint Macroeconomics and Labor Seminar* (Cornell University- Ithaca, United States); XXIV RIDGE Forum- Towards Sustainable Growth: From Micro to Macro Development* (Montevideo, Uruguay); 2027 STEG Theme Workshops* (Manchester, United Kingdom) (*scheduled)