IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/sunrpe/2020_0003.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Exit, Voice and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States A Comment

Author

Listed:
  • Pettersson-Lidbom, Per

    (Dept. of Economics, Stockholm University)

Abstract

In this comment, I revisit the question raised in Karadja and Prawitz (2019) concerning a causal relationship between mass emigration and long-run political outcomes. I find that their analysis fails to recognize that their independent variable of interest, emigration, is severely underreported since approximately 30% of all Swedish emigrants are missing from their data. As a result, their instrumental variable estimator is inconsistent due to nonclassical measurement error. Another important problem is that their instrument is unlikely to be conditionally exogenous due to insufficient control for confounders correlated with their weather-based instrument. Indeed, they fail to properly account for non-linearities in the effect of weather shocks and to control for unobserved heterogeneity at the weather station level. Correcting for the any of these problems reveals that there is no relationship between emigration and political outcomes.

Suggested Citation

  • Pettersson-Lidbom, Per, 2020. "Exit, Voice and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States A Comment," Research Papers in Economics 2020:3, Stockholm University, Department of Economics, revised 20 Sep 2020.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:sunrpe:2020_0003
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www2.ne.su.se/paper/wp20_03.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Melvin Stephens & Takashi Unayama, 2019. "Estimating the Impacts of Program Benefits: Using Instrumental Variables with Underreported and Imputed Data," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 101(3), pages 468-475, July.
    2. David Andersson & Mounir Karadja & Erik Prawitz, 2022. "Mass Migration and Technological Change," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 20(5), pages 1859-1896.
    3. Bound, John & Brown, Charles & Mathiowetz, Nancy, 2001. "Measurement error in survey data," Handbook of Econometrics, in: J.J. Heckman & E.E. Leamer (ed.), Handbook of Econometrics, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 59, pages 3705-3843, Elsevier.
    4. Pettersson-Lidbom, Per, 2020. "Exit, Voice and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States A Comment," Research Papers in Economics 2020:3, Stockholm University, Department of Economics, revised 20 Sep 2020.
    5. Michael Keane & Timothy Neal, 2021. "A Practical Guide to Weak Instruments," Discussion Papers 2021-05c, School of Economics, The University of New South Wales.
    6. David Andersson & Mounir Karadja & Erik Prawitz, 2022. "Mass Migration and Technological Change," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 20(5), pages 1859-1896.
    7. Michael Keane & Timothy Neal, 2021. "A Practical Guide to Weak Instruments," Discussion Papers 2021-05b, School of Economics, The University of New South Wales.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pettersson-Lidbom, Per, 2020. "Exit, Voice and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States A Comment," Research Papers in Economics 2020:3, Stockholm University, Department of Economics, revised 20 Sep 2020.
    2. Pettersson-Lidbom, Per, 2022. "Exit, Voice and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States. A Comment on Karadja and Prawitz (Journal of Political Economy, 2019)," Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics (JCRE), ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 1(2022-3), pages 1-13.
    3. Karadja, Mounir & Prawitz, Erik, 2020. "A response to Pettersson-Lidbom’s “Exit, Voice and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States – a Comment”," Working Paper Series 2020:5, Uppsala University, Department of Economics.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. David S. Lee & Justin McCrary & Marcelo J. Moreira & Jack Porter, 2022. "Valid t-Ratio Inference for IV," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 112(10), pages 3260-3290, October.
    2. Nina Boberg-Fazlić & Markus Lampe & Paul Sharp, 2021. "The Sleeping Giant Who Left for America: The Determinants and Impact of Danish Emigration During the Age of Mass Migration," Working Papers 0213, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).
    3. Melki, Mickael & Rapoport, Hillel & Spolaore, Enrico & Wacziarg, Romain, 2024. "Cultural Remittances and Modern Fertility," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 723, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    4. Timothy J. Hatton & Zachary Ward, 2024. "International Migration in the Atlantic Economy 1850–1940," Springer Books, in: Claude Diebolt & Michael Haupert (ed.), Handbook of Cliometrics, edition 3, pages 507-535, Springer.
    5. Mounir Karadja & Erik Prawitz, 2019. "Exit, Voice, and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 127(4), pages 1864-1925.
    6. Karadja, Mounir & Prawitz, Erik, 2020. "A response to Pettersson-Lidbom’s “Exit, Voice and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States – a Comment”," Working Paper Series 2020:5, Uppsala University, Department of Economics.
    7. Doko Tchatoka, Firmin & Wang, Wenjie, 2021. "Size-corrected Bootstrap Test after Pretesting for Exogeneity with Heteroskedastic or Clustered Data," MPRA Paper 110899, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Angrist, Joshua & Kolesár, Michal, 2024. "One instrument to rule them all: The bias and coverage of just-ID IV," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 240(2).
    9. Michael Keane & Timothy Neal, 2021. "Robust Inference for the Frisch Labor Supply Elasticity," Discussion Papers 2021-07b, School of Economics, The University of New South Wales.
    10. David Hémous & Morten Olsen, 2021. "Directed Technical Change in Labor and Environmental Economics," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 13(1), pages 571-597, August.
    11. Pettersson-Lidbom, Per, 2022. "Exit, Voice and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States. A Comment on Karadja and Prawitz (Journal of Political Economy, 2019)," Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics (JCRE), ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 1(2022-3), pages 1-13.
    12. Nathan Nunn, 2019. "Rethinking economic development," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 52(4), pages 1349-1373, November.
    13. Rabia Arif & Theresa Thompson Chaudhry & Azam Amjad Chaudhry, 2023. "Emigration’s Heterogeneous Impact on Children’s Wellbeing in Punjab, Pakistan," Child Indicators Research, Springer;The International Society of Child Indicators (ISCI), vol. 16(3), pages 1251-1295, June.
    14. Cäcilia Lipowski, 2024. "No Teens, No Tech: How Shortages of Young Workers Hinder Firm Technology Investments," CESifo Working Paper Series 11471, CESifo.
    15. Dicarlo, Emanuele, 2022. "How Do Firms Adjust to Negative Labor Supply Shocks? Evidence from Migration Outflows," IZA Discussion Papers 14994, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    16. Erminia Florio, 2019. "Are We in The Same Boat? The Legacy of Historical Emigration on Attitudes towards Immigrants," CEIS Research Paper 478, Tor Vergata University, CEIS, revised 12 Nov 2021.
    17. Tommasi, Denni & Zhang, Lina, 2024. "Bounding program benefits when participation is misreported," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 238(1).
    18. Saccone, Donatella & Posta, Pompeo Della & Marelli, Enrico & Signorelli, Marcello, 2022. "Public investment multipliers by functions of government: An empirical analysis for European countries," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 60(C), pages 531-545.
    19. Florio, Erminia & Manfredonia, Stefano, 2021. "Ancestors, inter-generational transmission of attitudes, and corporate performance: Evidence from the Italian Mass Migration," GLO Discussion Paper Series 830, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    20. Emanuele Dicarlo, 2022. "How do firms adjust to a negative labor supply shock? Evidence form migration outflows," Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) 1361, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    replication; emigration; non-classical measurement error; omitted variable bias;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:sunrpe:2020_0003. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Anne Jensen The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Anne Jensen to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/neisuse.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.