A pervasive, yet little acknowledged feature of international migration to developed countries is that newly arriving immigrants are increasingly highly skilled since the 1980s. This paper analyses the determinants of changes in the skill composition of immigrants using a framework suggested by...

A pervasive, yet little acknowledged feature of international migration to developed countries is that newly arriving immigrants are increasingly highly skilled since the 1980s. This paper analyses the determinants of changes in the skill composition of immigrants using a framework suggested by...

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...

International migration analysis often focuses on mass migration rather than on the international mobility of elites, which is the focus of this paper. The paper offers a three-fold classification of elites: (a) knowledge elites, (b) entrepreneurial elites and (c) political elites. We explore...

Putnam (1995)'s seminal work was one of the first to describe the decline of social capital in the US after the 1960s, a period that saw a large increase in the flow of immigrants into the US. Using the Volunteer Supplement of the September Sample of the Current Population Survey (CPS) between...

We review the growing literature on the political effects of immigration. After a brief summary of the economics of immigration, we turn to the main focus of the paper: how immigrants influence electoral outcomes in receiving countries, and why. We start from the "standard" view that immigration...

This paper studies the impact of U.S. immigration barriers on global knowledge production. We present four key findings. First, among Nobel Prize winners and Fields Medalists, migrants to the U.S. play a central role in the global knowledge network—representing 20-33% of the frontier knowledge...

This paper studies the impact of U.S. immigration barriers on global knowledge production. We present four key findings. First, among Nobel Prize winners and Fields Medalists, migrants to the U.S. play a central role in the global knowledge network— representing 20-33% of the frontier...

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...

We review the growing literature on the political economy of immigration. First, we discuss the effects of immigration on a wide range of political and social outcomes. The existing evidence suggests that immigrants often, but not always, trigger backlash, increasing support for anti-immigrant...