Work in Progress
This paper estimates the causal effect of obtaining a U.S. H-1B work visa on individual workers. Identifying this effect has been difficult because visa receipt is endogenous and applicant-level employment data are typically unlinked. I overcome both challenges using newly released 2019–2023 application-level data obtained through FOIA requests and the random allocation of H-1B visas via lottery. I focus on U.S.-trained international graduates working under Optional Practical Training (OPT), for whom pre-lottery employment is observable, and link applicants to their full education and work histories using probabilistic record-linkage algorithms. Regression estimates comparing lottery winners and losers show that winning increases the probability of remaining employed in the U.S. two years later by 2.8 percentage points and reduces return-to-school behavior, especially for those nearing the end of OPT eligibility. These modest but significant effects suggest that many losers stay through alternative channels. The findings indicate that for U.S.-trained workers, the H-1B primarily facilitates talent retention rather than crowding out native workers, offering new insights for skilled-immigration policy.
Married women in the early 20th century U.S. faced “marriage bars,” a form of employer discrimination that barred them from paid employment. However, because the end of marriage bar use coincided with shifting social norms and labor market conditions, it is unclear how the end of marriage bars affected women’s employment. We study the effects of the legislative prohibition of marriage bars in teaching during the 1930s. A difference-in-differences design shows that the prohibitions increased the share of married women teachers, partly by pushing unmarried women out of the labor force, and modestly increased women's labor force participation.
Migration costs of various forms play a growing role in the global landscape of migration today. Despite their importance, however, the complexity and heterogeneity of modern-day immigration systems have made it difficult to assess whether these costs reduce migration, and if so, how the composition of the immigrant pool is affected. In this paper I leverage a historical Canadian immigration policy, the 1885 Chinese Head Tax, which imposed a time-varying per-person fee on Chinese immigrants to Canada, and detailed arrival microdata to estimate how increases in migration costs affected Chinese immigration to Canada. I directly estimate the elasticity of immigration inflow with respect to migration cost to be -2.7, the first such estimate to my knowledge. I then document changes in the composition of the Chinese immigrant pool in Canada. I find that as the cost of migration increased, Chinese immigrants to Canada became more positively selected on the basis of height (a common measure of human capital in economic history) as well as numeracy and occupation, consistent with a model of selection into immigration featuring skill-varying costs.