There has been little rigorous evaluation of immigration barriers intended to improve domestic terms of employment by shrinking the workforce. We study one such barrier, a policy change that excluded almost half a million Mexican bracero seasonal agricultural workers from the United States....

Rural to urban migration is an integral part of the development process, but there is little evidence on how out-migration transforms rural labor markets. Emigration could benefit landless village residents by reducing labor competition, or conversely, reduce productivity if skilled workers...

This paper investigates how increases in concentration can be interrupted or reversed by changes in how firms compete on quality. We examine the U.S. hotel industry during the past half century. We document that starting in the early 1980s, quality competition came more in the form of costs that...

The repeated failure of Ireland's potato crop in the late 1840s led to a major famine and a surge in migration to the US. We build a dataset of Irish immigrants and their sons by linking males from 1850 to 1880 US census records. For comparison, we also link German and British immigrants, their...

We estimate differences in innovation behavior between foreign versus U.S.-born entrepreneurs in high-tech industries. Our data come from the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs, a random sample of firms with detailed information on owner characteristics and innovation activities. We find uniformly...

In the 1980s the composition of immigrants to the U.S. shifted towards less-skilled workers. Around this time, real wages and employment of younger and less-educated U.S. workers fell. Some blame recent immigration shifts for the misfortunes of unskilled workers in the U.S. OLS estimates using...

Using new survey data from Mexico, a dynamic econometric model is estimated to test the effect of policy changes on the flow of migrant labor from rural Mexico to the United States and test for differential effects of policy changes on male and female migration. We find that both IRCA and NAFTA...

Using data drawn from the Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. Censuses, we find a numerically comparable and statistically significant inverse relation between immigrant-induced shifts in labor supply and wages in each of the three countries: A 10 percent labor supply shift is associated with a 3 to 4...

From the 1970s to the early 2000s, the United States experienced an epochal wave of low-skilled immigration. Since the Great Recession, however, U.S. borders have become a far less active place when it comes to the net arrival of foreign workers. The number of undocumented immigrants has...

In this paper, we document the importance of high-skilled immigration for U.S. employment in STEM fields. To begin, we review patterns of U.S. employment in STEM occupations among workers with at least a college degree. These patterns mirror the cycle of boom and bust in the U.S. technology...