International migrants who seek protection also participate in the economy. Thus the policy of the United States to drastically reduce refugee and asylum-seeker arrivals from 2017 to 2020 might have substantial and ongoing economic consequences. This paper places conservative bounds on those...

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 cashflow accounting offer precision at the cost of bias; methods based on general equilibrium modeling address bias...

The U.S. 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...

Legal and illegal markets often coexist. In theory, marginal legalization can either substitute for the remaining parallel market, or complement it via scale effects. I study migrants crossing without prior authorization at the US southwest border, where large-scale unlawful crossing coexists...

The most basic economic theory suggests that rising incomes in developing countries will deter emigration from those countries, an idea that captivates policymakers in international aid and trade diplomacy. A lengthy literature and recent data suggest something quite different: that over the...

The welcome rise of replication tests in economics has not been accompanied by a single, clear definition of replication. A discrepant replication, in current usage of the term, can signal anything from an unremarkable disagreement over methods to scientific incompetence or misconduct. This...

This paper critiques the last decade of research on the effects of high-skill emigration from developing countries, and proposes six new directions for fruitful research. The study singles out a core assumption underlying much of the recent literature, calling it the Lump of Learning model of...

'Guest workers' earn higher wages overseas on temporary low-skill employment visas. This wage effect can quantify global inefficiencies in the pure spatial allocation of labor between poorer and richer countries. But rigorous estimates are rare, complicated by migrant self-selection. This paper...

Theory suggests that groups historically subject to discrimination, such as Jews, could exhibit traditionally high investment in education because discrimination spurred exit facilitated by human capital. Theory moreover suggests that if exit is uncertain, it could induce investment in skill...

An influential strand of research has tested for the effects of immigration on natives' wages and employment using exogenous refugee supply shocks as natural experiments. Several studies have reached conflicting conclusions about the effects of noted refugee waves such as the Mariel Boatlift in...