Immigrant Entrepreneurship and Local Economic Resiliency

What makes some local labor markets more resilient to business cycle fluctuations than others? Despite evidence of large disparities in local responses to recessions, policymakers have little guidance on how to build resiliency to secular declines in labor demand. This project proposes and tests the notion that immigrant employers were an important input into local economic resiliency during the Great Recession. Using a unique suite of restricted-access data on businesses and their owners from the US Census Bureau, it tests whether and which immigrant-owned businesses performed better than their native-owned counterparts during the Great Recession and whether these differential responses played an important role during the subsequent recovery period