Abstract
<p>In the wake of rising immigration, this dissertation investigates the skill distributions of immigrants across different cities to determine where immigrants of certain skill levels locate and what type of immigrant and individual characteristics may influence location preferences. Furthermore, I am interested in the potential effects of a proposed new type of place-based immigrant visa. I utilize existing theory on skill complementarities as a framework for labor mobility of immigrants in combination with stochastic dominance testing to analyze immigrant location choices. Results suggest evidence of a thicker lower tail in the skill distribution of large cities, and of a thicker upper tail in small cities which consists of approximately the top 2% of earners. Furthermore, without the top 2% of earners, there is a higher density of immigrants in large cities starting with individuals that have approximately Bachelor's degree level earnings. This finding lends support to the idea of a new place-based immigrant visa. As such, I also investigate potential impacts of such a place-based visa using a slightly altered model of skill complementarity. Results suggests slightly negative effects on high-skilled immigrant wages but positive effects on receiving cities' populations, output, and consumption. Since certain individual and immigrant characteristics may also play an important role in immigrants' location preferences, I also present a new quantile test of initial dominance which will allow investigation of immigrant skill distributions after the inclusion of control variables. Simulation studies reveal the test to have solid size and power performance. An application of the new test to the immigrant data reveals that the distributional tail results are robust to the inclusion of various control variables. However, certain immigrant characteristics change the size of the left tail indicating that relative location preferences differ among immigrants, which could be of significance when considering future immigrant visas that may target specific populations.<br />
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