We review Immigration Economics by George J. Borjas, published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. The book is written as a graduate-level textbook, and summarizes and updates many of Borjas's important contributions to the field over the past thirty years. A key message of the book is that immigration poses significant costs to many members of the host-country labor market. Though the theoretical and econometric approaches presented in the book will be very useful for students and specialists in the field, we argue that the book presents a one-sided view of immigration, with little or no attention to the growing body of work that offers a more nuanced picture of how immigrants fit into the host-country market and affect native workers. (JEL A22, J11, J24, J31, J61, R23)

We evaluate a tracking program in a large urban district where schools with at least one gifted fourth grader create a separate “gifted/high achiever” classroom. Most seats are filled by non-gifted high achievers, ranked by previous-year test scores. We study the program's effects on the high achievers using (i) a rank-based regres sion discontinuity design, and (ii) a between-school/cohort analysis. We find significant effects that are concentrated among black and Hispanic participants. Minorities gain 0.5 standard deviation units in fourth-grade reading and math scores, with persistent gains through sixth grade. We find no evidence of negative or positive spillovers on nonparticipants. (JEL I21, J21, J24)

Abstract There is growing evidence that firm-specific pay premiums are an important source of wage inequality. These premiums will contribute to the gender wage gap if women are less likely to work at high-paying firms or if women negotiate (or are offered) worse wage bargains with their employers than men. Using longitudinal data on the hourly wages of Portuguese workers matched with income statement information for firms, we show that the wages of both men and women contain firm-specific premiums that are strongly correlated with simple measures of the potential bargaining surplus at each firm. We then show how the impact of these firm-specific pay differentials on the gender wage gap can be decomposed into a combination of sorting and bargaining effects. We find that women are less likely to work at firms that pay higher premiums to either gender, with sorting effects being most important for low- and middle-skilled workers. We also find that women receive only 90% of the firm-specific pay premiums earned by men. Importantly, we find the same gender gap in the responses of wages to changes in potential surplus over time. Taken together, the combination of sorting and bargaining effects explain about one-fifth of the cross-sectional gender wage gap in Portugal.