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WORKING PAPERS
February 21, 2023
Immigration policy can have important net fiscal effects that vary by immigrants’ skill level. But mainstream methods to estimate these effects are problematic. Methods based on cash-flow accounting offer precision at the cost of bias; methods based on general equilibrium modeling address bias with ...
WORKING PAPERS
January 23, 2023
The US limits work visas for low-skill jobs outside of agriculture, with a binding quota that firms access via a randomized lottery. We evaluate the marginal impact of the quota on firms entering the 2021 H-2B visa lottery using a novel survey and pre-analysis plan. Firms exogenously authorized to e...
WORKING PAPERS
January 28, 2022
The past several decades have witnessed a rebirth of global labor mobility. Workers have begun to move between countries at rates not seen since before World War One. During the same period, economists’ study of international migration has been framed by a particular textbook model of location choic...
WORKING PAPERS
October 14, 2021
How many immigrants with less than university education, for a given immigration quota, maximise economic output? The answer is simple—zero—in the canonical model of the labour market, where the marginal product of a university-educated immigrant is always higher. We build an alternative model, foll...
WORKING PAPERS
June 14, 2021
There will be 95 million fewer working-age people in Europe in 2050 than in 2015, under business as usual. The paper compares business as usual estimates of inflows to 2050 with the size of the labor gap in Europe. Under plausible estimates, business as usual will fill one-third of the labor gap. Th...
WORKING PAPERS
August 18, 2020
Many governments seek to reduce emigration from low-income countries by encouraging economic development there. A large literature, however, observes that average emigration rates are higher in countries with sustained increases in GDP per capita than in either chronically poor countries or establis...
WORKING PAPERS
January 31, 2019
‘Guest workers’ earn higher wages overseas on temporary low-skill employment visas. This wage gap can be used to measure gaps in the productivity of workers due to where they are, not who they are. This paper estimates the effects of guest work on Indian applicants to a construction job ...
WORKING PAPERS
March 20, 2018
Simply allowing more labor mobility holds vastly more promise for reducing poverty than anything else on the development agenda. That said, the magnitude of the gains from large growth accelerations (and losses from large decelerations) are also many-fold larger than the potential gains from directe...