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Contents Introduction

This paper examines neighborhood effects among migrants in an urban labor market, using pooled cross-section data from Bangkok, Thailand, that has experienced large scale inflows of migrants from the rural areas. In particular, we test whether or not the labor–market performance of previous migrants has externalities to that of new migrants from the same origin provinces. Although it has been increasingly recognized in both economics and sociology that non-market interactions of agents play important roles in a number of activities such as job search and education, there is a gap between those theoretical conjectures and empirical tests. We use the Labor Force Survey from Bangkok that records both the length of stay for migrants to the city and provinces from which they migrated. From this information, it is possible to identify the effects of previous migrants on new migrants for each origin. Our empirical results, that control origin fixed effects are two fold: i) the relative size of migration positively affects employment probabilities of new migrants (scale effect), and ii) the estimated employment probabilities of previous migrants also raise those of new migrants. We also simulate the magnitude of the origin externalities, that prove its significance to the overall performance of the urban labor market, given the large proportion of migrants in the Bangkok labor force.