Twelve U.S. states, plus the District of Columbia, have recently enacted measures granting undocumented immigrants access to driving licenses. We exploit the state and temporal variation in the issuing of state driving licenses to undocumented immigrants to estimate its impact on these...

This paper identifies intermarriage (between non-citizens and citizens) as an important response mechanism to intensified immigration enforcement, particularly among Mexican non-citizens. Exploiting the temporal and geographic variation in the implementation of interior immigration enforcement...

Over the past two decades, the U.S. has seen a drastic growth in self-employment among Mexican immigrants, the largest immigrant population in the country. This is an interesting yet puzzling trend, in stark contrast to the stagnated growth of self-employment among other disadvantaged minority...

Historical, longitudinal data are used to track the earnings of cohorts of immigrant and U.S.-born women over time. The longitudinal data circumvent potential cohort biases that afflict cross-sectional analyses of immigrant earnings growth and biases due to immigrant emigration and other issues...

The labor market "quality" of immigrants is a subject of debate among immigration researchers, and a major public policy concern. However, traditional methods of measuring human capital are particularly difficult to apply to recently arrived immigrants. Many factors that have a negative effect...

Over the past two decades immigration enforcement has grown exponentially in the United States. We exploit the geographical and temporal variation in a novel index of the intensity of immigration enforcement between 2005 and 2011 to show how the average yearly increase in interior immigration...

For the first time since the inception of the H-1B visa, yearly caps became binding in 2004, making it harder for most foreign-born students to secure employment in the United States. However, since the year 2000, institutions of higher education and related non-profit research institutes had...

Domestic violence is a serious under-reported crime in the United States, especially among immigrant women. While the Violence against Women Act (VAWA) allows battered immigrants to petition for legal status without relying on abusive U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident spouses, we find...

Tougher immigration enforcement has been responsible for 1.8 million deportations between 2009 and 2013 alone, most of them involving fathers and heads of household. We exploit the geographic and temporal variation in intensified enforcement to gauge its impact on children's propensity to live...

This paper describes the theoretical underpinnings and provides empirical evidence for a model that predicts a positive impact of immigration on entrepreneurial activity. Immigrants, we hypothesize, facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship by being willing and able to invest in new skills. At...