The United States' H-1B visa program, which allows private firms to hire highly skilled foreign workers, was so severely over-subscribed in the years since 2014 that H-1B status was distributed by lotteries to a subset of applicants. Using data on H-1B applications and on a range of outcomes for...

The H-1B program allows skilled foreign-born individuals to work in the United States. The annual quota on new H-1B visa issuances fell from 195,000 to 65,000 for employees of most firms in fiscal year 2004. However, this cap did not apply to new employees of colleges, universities, and...

This paper contains three important contributions to the literature on international migrations. First, it compiles a new dataset on migration flows (and stocks) and on immigration laws for 14 OECD destination countries and 74 sending countries for each year over the period 1980-2005. Second, it...

This paper makes two contributions to the literature on the determinants of international migration flows. First, we compile a new dataset on annual bilateral migration flows covering 15 OECD destination countries and 120 sending countries for the period 1980-2006. We also collect data on...

This paper explores the relationship between openness to trade and to immigration on income per person. To address endogeneity concerns we extend the instrumental-variables strategy first used by Frankel and Romer (1999). We show that distance (geographical and cultural) can be used to build a...

From the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic to late 2021, international immigration flows to the US decreased significantly. We document the timing and the characteristics of these significant changes in flows, their evolution until late 2022 and their geographic and sector distribution. We...

The inflow of refugees and their subsequent integration can be an important challenge for both the refugees themselves and the host society. Policy interventions can improve the lives and economic success of refugees and of their communities. In this paper, we review the socioeconomic...

We evaluate the effect on newly arrived refugees' employment of a policy, introduced in Denmark in 2013, that matched refugees to occupations with local labor shortages after basic training for those jobs. Leveraging the staggered roll-out across municipalities, we find that the policy increased...

Since the turn of the last century, nationalistic political parties have been gaining support in Europe. Over the same period, terror attacks have increased. Using data from European Social Surveys (ESS), we examine the effects of terror attacks involving at least one fatality on attitudes...

This paper estimates, within a common framework, the effects of four types of integration polices on the employment probability and earnings of refugees in Denmark during the last three decades. We first review the studies that use a credible identification strategy to evaluate the causal...