Immigration has become a central driver of U.S. labor force growth. We document new empirical findings that shed light on the relationships between immigration, labor shortages, wage growth, and job openings during the high-immigration period of 2021-2024. The textbook search-and-matching model...

This paper estimates the causal impact of Brexit on migrant employment in the United Kingdom using a synthetic difference-in-differences (SDID) framework. We construct a counterfactual trajectory for the UK based on a weighted combination of comparable European economies and compare...

The educational distribution of U.S. immigrants shifted significantly to the right in recent decades as the share without a high school diploma fell and the share with a bachelor's degrees rose. This improvement coincided with a shift in immigrants' origins toward Asia and rising global...

The H-1B program lets firms hire high-skill foreign workers for a six-year term. The annual number of visas allocated to for-profit firms is capped at 85,000 and there is excess demand for those visas. The analysis merges administrative data, including the I-129 petitions that report the wage...

his paper investigates how immigration affects consumer prices. Using scanner data and instrumenting county-level immigration with historical ancestry patterns, we find that an inflow of 10,000 immigrants lowers four-year price growth by 0.58 percentage points. Leveraging variation in firm...

This paper examines how proposed U.S. restrictions on international students would affect the nation's STEM workforce and long-run economic growth. Focusing on the most common pipeline from U.S. universities to the labor market, we show that international education is the principal mechanism by...

This paper studies the impact of birthright citizenship on youth crime. We leverage a reform which automatically granted birthright citizenship to eligible immigrant children born in Germany after January 1, 2000 and administrative crime data from three federal states. Immigrant youth who...

This paper reexamines the trade creation effects of migration using a large sample of 180 countries from 1995 to 2023. We estimate a structural gravity model of bilateral trade augmented with migration stocks, investigating whether immigration to OECD countries relates to the extensive and...

We examine the wage returns to host-country work experience among immigrants by reconstructing full employment histories using Swedish pension records and longitudinal matched employer–employee data. Our findings show that: (i) returns to experience are sizable and concave, consistent with...

This paper examines how declining migration opportunities to the United States affect local labor markets in Mexico. Using novel micro-level data from consular identification cards and deportations, we link individuals’ Mexican municipalities of origin to their U.S. destination states. We...

Immigration was central both to the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign and to the political narratives that followed it. Yet the trajectory of migration to the UK since the referendum bears little resemblance to the expectations - or promises - articulated at the time. This paper provides an...

This paper studies the causal impact of language skills on human capital accumulation, labor market outcomes, and job characteristics of childhood immigrants across European countries. Using PIAAC data, we adopt an instrumental variable strategy based on the critical age hypothesis and...

The US government in 2025 imposed a $100,000 tax on each high-skill foreign worker entering with an H-1B work visa. The only public economic justification calculates the tax to offset an estimated wage penalty for H-1B workers relative to US natives. But this estimate suffers from substantial...

The educational distribution of U.S. immigrants shifted significantly to the right in recent decades as the share without a high school diploma fell and the share with a bachelor's degree rose. This improvement coincided with a shift in immigrants' origins toward Asia and rising global education...

This paper shows that immigrants not only have differential effects on trade based on their skill levels but that they play an additional role in facilitating bilateral trade if their origin country has a higher level of corruption and weaker institutions. Using immigrant stock across skill...

Immigrants across Europe earn less and work in lower-quality jobs than natives, but the mechanisms underlying these disparities remain poorly understood. This paper asks whether immigrant disadvantage reflects barriers to accessing good jobs or skill deficits that persist even within similar...

We provide causal evidence that immigration has contributed to the polarization of American politics. Using an ancestry-based shift-share instrument, we study immigration flows into U.S. counties between 1992 and 2016. Counties exposed to larger immigrant inflows become more polarized both in...

This paper studies the impact of birthright citizenship on youth crime. We leverage a reform which automatically granted birthright citizenship to eligible immigrant children born in Germany after January 1, 2000 and administrative crime data from three federal states. Immigrant youth who...

Members of certain minority groups are disadvantaged in different areas of society, such as the labor and housing market and the healthcare system. This is referred to as discrimination if people are disadvantaged solely based on their group membership (e.g., ethnic background or religious...

This paper examines the relationship between labor market power and employer discrimination, providing new causal evidence on when and where discriminatory outcomes arise. We leverage mass layoffs and firm closures as a source of exogenous job search and combine this with an exact matching...

Migration in the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region is growing in importance, shaped by workers seeking opportunities abroad and governments implementing policies to meet skills needs and stimulate economic growth. Most migrants in the area are economic migrants, voluntarily moving abroad to...

Immigrant rights have been found to be better protected in democracies than in authoritarian regimes, but there is no systematic test of different explanations of why this is the case. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by investigating which features of democratic political systems are...

This paper documents the effects of home-country Internet expansion on immigrants' health and subjective well-being (SWB). Combining data on SWB and health from the European Social Survey (ESS) with data on 3G and overall Internet expansion (ITU and Collins Batholomew), I find that immigrants'...

We investigate the relationship between immigration and right-wing populism, which we characterize as a self-reinforcing process. Anti-immigrant rhetoric and populist policies lead to a deterioration in the skill level of immigrants. This in turn fuels populist support. Historical and...

We use a shift-share approach to estimate the impact of inward immigration on local inflation in the United States. We find that a higher rate of immigration reduces inflation, lowering it by about 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points following a doubling of immigration. Higher immigration flows also...

This paper documents the effects of home-country Internet expansion on immigrants' health and subjective well-being (SWB). Combining data on SWB and health from the European Social Survey (ESS) with data on 3G and overall Internet expansion (ITU and Collins Batholomew), I find that immigrants'...

We estimate intergenerational mobility of immigrants and their children in fifteen receiving countries. We document large income gaps for first-generation immigrants that diminish in the second generation. Around half of the second-generation gap can be explained by differences in parental...

During New Year’s Eve 2015/2016, the German city of Cologne witnessed mass sexual assaults and thefts by perpetrators described as having an Arab-African appearance. This paper studies whether the event in Cologne led to a backlash in crimes against refugees in Germany....

Restrictive immigration policies may force firms to abruptly change their workforce composition. But how does this impact the performance of these organizations? We study the effects of the 2016 Brexit referendum, which led to a drop in the share of EU nationality nurses in English hospitals....

In this study we evaluate the effects of low-skilled immigration on small businesses, wages and employment in Germany. We develop a search and matching model with heterogeneous workers, cross-skill matching, and endogenous entry into entrepreneurship. The model is calibrated using German...

Using data from a largely representative survey of 801 Atlantic Canadian employers, this paper conducts regression analyses to test associations between two diversity variables and five objective and subjective measures of firm performance: revenue change and employment change in the previous...

Debates about immigration’s role in addressing population aging typically concentrate on immigrant fertility rates. Moreover, standard projections account for migration’s impact on overall population growth while largely overlooking how immigration might affect native fertility. In contrast,...