Kaushal, Neeraj, Robert Kaestner, and Cordelia Reimers. 2007. “Labor Market Effects of September 11th on Arab and Muslim Residents of the United States.” Journal of Human Resources 42(2): 275–308.
We investigated whether the September 11, 2001 terrorists’ attacks had any effect on employment, earnings, and residential mobility of first- and second-generation Arab and Muslim men in the United States. We find that September 11th did not significantly affect employment and hours of work of Arab and Muslim men, but was associated with a 9-11 percent decline in their real wage and weekly earnings, with some evidence that this decline was temporary. The adverse earnings effects were strongly linked to hate crime incidence. Estimates also suggest that the terrorists’ attacks reduced intrastate migration of Arab and Muslim men.
Neeraj Kaushal is an assistant professor of social work, Columbia University; Robert Kaestner is a professor of economics, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Cordelia Reimers is a professor of economics, Hunter College of the City University of New York. The authors thank the Russell Sage Foundation for providing partial funding for the project. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s conference on Immigration in the United States, April 29, 2005. The authors thank the participants in that conference and also seminar participants at Columbia University School of Social Work, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, RAND, and the University of Illinois at Chicago for their helpful suggestions. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning October 2007 through September 2010 from Neeraj Kaushal, 1255 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, New York 10027 <nk464@columbia.edu>.