George Borjas

Economist whose 2015/2017 reappraisal of the Mariel Boatlift — restricting the sample to high-school dropouts — found a large wage decline for that subgroup, reversing David Card's 1990 null result; the figure both Peri & Yasenov's synthetic-control critique and Clemens & Hunt's census-artifact argument argue against. In his direct 2017 reply to Clemens & Hunt ("Still More on Mariel: The Role of Race," NBER WP 23504), he mounts a specific timing rebuttal to the artifact story, then reports — on his own data — that a more flexible race-adjustment model proposed by Clemens shrinks his estimate toward zero, relocating rather than closing the dispute.

References

• claim-mariel-boatlift-wage-effect-flips-with-sample-construction · claim-mariel-wage-effect-may-be-1980-census-methodology-artifact · claim-borjas-timing-rebuttal-mariel-black-share-flat-during-wage-drop · claim-mariel-wage-effect-depends-on-race-adjustment-model-choice
• Captures: 2026-07-09-hop-synthetic-control-mariel-boatlift, 2026-07-29-does-the-clemens-hunt-argument-that-borjass-mariel