[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedrwp/98171.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Impact of Immigration on Firms and Workers: Insights from the H-1B Lottery

Author

Abstract
We study how random variation in the availability of highly educated, foreign-born workers impacts firm performance and recruitment behavior. We combine two rich data sources: 1) administrative employer-employee matched data from the US Census Bureau; and 2) firm-level information on the first large-scale H-1B visa lottery in 2007. Using an event-study approach, we find that lottery wins lead to increases in firm hiring of college-educated, immigrant labor along with increases in scale and survival. These effects are stronger for small, skill-intensive, and high-productivity firms that participate in the lottery. We do not find evidence for displacement of native-born, college-educated workers at the firm level, on net. However, this result masks dynamics among more specific subgroups of incumbents that we further elucidate.

Suggested Citation

  • Agostina Brinatti & Mingyu Chen & Parag Mahajan & Nicolas Morales & Kevin Shih, 2024. "The Impact of Immigration on Firms and Workers: Insights from the H-1B Lottery," Working Paper 24-04, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedrwp:98171
    DOI: 10.21144/wp24-04
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/RichmondFedOrg/publications/research/working_papers/2024/wp24-04.pdf
    File Function: Working Paper
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.21144/wp24-04?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Andreas Beerli & Jan Ruffner & Michael Siegenthaler & Giovanni Peri, 2021. "The Abolition of Immigration Restrictions and the Performance of Firms and Workers: Evidence from Switzerland," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 111(3), pages 976-1012, March.
    2. Nada Wasi & Aaron Flaaen, 2015. "Record linkage using Stata: Preprocessing, linking, and reviewing utilities," Stata Journal, StataCorp LP, vol. 15(3), pages 672-697, September.
    3. Kirk Doran & Alexander Gelber & Adam Isen, 2022. "The Effects of High-Skilled Immigration Policy on Firms: Evidence from Visa Lotteries," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 130(10), pages 2501-2533.
    4. Takao Kato & Chad Sparber, 2013. "Quotas and Quality: The Effect of H-1B Visa Restrictions on the Pool of Prospective Undergraduate Students from Abroad," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 95(1), pages 109-126, March.
    5. Davis, Steven J & Haltiwanger, John & Schuh, Scott, 1996. "Small Business and Job Creation: Dissecting the Myth and Reassessing the Facts," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 8(4), pages 297-315, August.
    6. Ariel Burstein & Gordon Hanson & Lin Tian & Jonathan Vogel, 2020. "Tradability and the Labor‐Market Impact of Immigration: Theory and Evidence From the United States," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 88(3), pages 1071-1112, May.
    7. Prithwiraj Choudhury & Do Yoon Kim, 2019. "The ethnic migrant inventor effect: Codification and recombination of knowledge across borders," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(2), pages 203-229, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Silliman, Mikko & Willén, Alexander, 2024. "Worker Power, Immigrant Sorting, and Firm Dynamics," Discussion Paper Series in Economics 13/2024, Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Cristelli, Gabriele & Lissoni, Francesco, 2020. "Free movement of inventors: open-border policy and innovation in Switzerland," MPRA Paper 107433, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Parag Mahajan, 2021. "Immigration and Local Business Dynamics: Evidence from U.S. Firms," Working Papers 21-18, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    3. Agostina Brinatti & Xing Guo, 2023. "Third-Country Effects of U.S. Immigration Policy," Staff Working Papers 23-60, Bank of Canada.
    4. Mayda, Anna Maria & Ortega, Francesc & Peri, Giovanni & Shih, Kevin & Sparber, Chad, 2018. "The effect of the H-1B quota on the employment and selection of foreign-born labor," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 108(C), pages 105-128.
    5. Amuedo Dorantes, Catalina & Arenas-Arroyo, Esther & Mahajan, Parag & Schmidpeter, Bernhard, 2023. "Low-wage jobs, foreign-born workers, and firm performance," Ruhr Economic Papers 1040, RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen.
    6. Nicholas Bloom & John Van Reenen & Heidi Williams, 2019. "A toolkit of policies to promote innovation," Voprosy Ekonomiki, NP Voprosy Ekonomiki, issue 10.
    7. Paul Carrillo & Dave Donaldson & Dina Pomeranz & Monica Singhal, 2023. "Misallocation in Firm Production: A Nonparametric Analysis Using Procurement Lotteries," CESifo Working Paper Series 10485, CESifo.
    8. Ariu, Andrea & Müller, Tobias & Nguyen, Tuan, 2023. "Immigration and the Slope of the Labor Demand Curve: The Role of Firm Heterogeneity in a Model of Regional Labor Markets," CEPR Discussion Papers 18091, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    9. Kahn, Shulamit & MacGarvie, Megan, 2020. "The impact of permanent residency delays for STEM PhDs: Who leaves and why," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 49(9).
    10. Sari Pekkala Kerr & William Kerr & Çağlar Özden & Christopher Parsons, 2016. "Global Talent Flows," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 30(4), pages 83-106, Fall.
    11. Anna Maria Mayda & Francesc Ortega & Giovanni Peri & Kevin Shih & Chad Sparber, 2018. "New Data and Facts on H-1B Workers across Firms," NBER Chapters, in: The Roles of Immigrants and Foreign Students in US Science, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship, pages 99-121, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Sari Pekkala Kerr & William Kerr & Çağlar Özden & Christopher Parsons, 2017. "High-Skilled Migration and Agglomeration," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 9(1), pages 201-234, September.
    13. Anger, Silke & Bassetto, Jacopo & Sandner, Malte, 2024. "Lifting Barriers to Skill Transferability: Immigrant Integration through Occupational Recognition," IZA Discussion Papers 17444, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    14. Andreas Beerli & Ronald Indergand & Johannes S. Kunz, 2023. "The supply of foreign talent: how skill-biased technology drives the location choice and skills of new immigrants," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 36(2), pages 681-718, April.
    15. Prithwiraj Choudhury & Kirk Doran & Astrid Marinoni & Chungeun Yoon, 2022. "Loss of Peers and Individual Worker Performance: Evidence from H-1B Visa Denials," CESifo Working Paper Series 10152, CESifo.
    16. repec:zbw:bofrdp:2017_002 is not listed on IDEAS
    17. Francesco Lissoni & Ernest Miguelez, 2024. "Migration and Innovation: Learning from Patent and Inventor Data," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 38(1), pages 27-54, Winter.
    18. Sparber, Chad, 2019. "Substitution between groups of highly-educated, foreign-born, H-1B workers," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(C).
    19. Silliman, Mikko & Willén, Alexander, 2024. "Worker Power, Immigrant Sorting, and Firm Dynamics," Discussion Paper Series in Economics 13/2024, Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics.
    20. Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes & Delia Furtado, 2019. "Settling for Academia?: H-1B Visas and the Career Choices of International Students in the United States," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 54(2), pages 401-429.
    21. Matthias Niggli, 2023. "‘Moving On’—investigating inventors’ ethnic origins using supervised learning," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 23(4), pages 921-947.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Immigration; Firm Dynamics; productivity; H-1B visas; High-skill immigration;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F22 - International Economics - - International Factor Movements and International Business - - - International Migration
    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedrwp:98171. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christian Pascasio (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbrius.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.