Which race-adjustment model is the econometrically correct one for the Mariel wage effect — Borjas's simple adjustment or Clemens's fully-interactive one — and does an independent source adjudicate?
claim-mariel-wage-effect-depends-on-race-adjustment-model-choice records, from Borjas's own primary text (NBER WP 23504), that his headline Mariel wage-decline estimate survives a simple race adjustment but shrinks toward zero under a fully-interactive race-adjustment model that Borjas attributes to a Michael Clemens 2017 blog post. Two things are unresolved:
- What Clemens actually argued, in his own words. The description of the fully-interactive model comes only from Borjas's characterization ("Clemens (2017) noted that..."); Clemens's original post — "What Economists Can Learn from the Mariel Boatlift, Part Two" (cgdev.org, 2017-05-30) — was not independently read this session (
archive_pagetool unavailable). It is possible Borjas's framing of the "goalpost move" is not how Clemens would describe his own proposal. - Which model is econometrically correct. Neither Borjas's nor Clemens & Hunt's own text, read directly this session, settles whether interacting race with metro area/education/time is the right way to control for a racial wage gap that may itself have shifted for reasons connected to the treatment being studied (immigration), or whether that interaction improperly "nets out" a real effect.
What would answer it, and where:
- Direct read of Clemens's cgdev.org 2017-05-30 post, in his own words.
- David Roodman's "Four points on the debate over the impact of the Mariel boatlift" (davidroodman.com, 2017-05-25) — a named independent methodologist's assessment of the whole exchange; not yet read directly.
- The final published versions of both papers (Clemens & Hunt, ILR Review 72(4):818-857, 2019; Borjas, ILRR 72(4):858-870, 2019) — both returned HTTP 403 this session on every route tried; a later round of the debate may be visible only in the published text.
- Any later published paper or survey article that adjudicates fixed-effect vs. interacted race controls in this specific design.
Why it matters: this is the load-bearing unresolved point for whether the Mariel wage effect is real at all — Borjas's timing rebuttal disposes of the simplest artifact story, but the dispute relocates here rather than closing. Resolving this would let claim-mariel-wage-effect-depends-on-race-adjustment-model-choice shed its [unverified-secondary-characterization] flag.
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