We present a novel theory that immigrants facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship by being willing and able to invest in new skills. Immigrants whose human capital is not immediately transferable to the host country face lower opportunity costs of investing in new skills or methods and will...

Geographic mobility is important for the functioning of labor markets because it brings labor resources to where they can be most efficiently used. It has long been hypothesized that individuals' migration propensities depend on their attitudes towards risk, but the empirical evidence, to the...

Using recently-available data from the New Immigrant Survey, we find that previous self-employment experience in an immigrant's country of origin is an important determinant of their self-employment status in the U.S., increasing the probability of being self-employed by about 7 percent. Our...

We describe the demand for interns in the U.S. using ads from an internship-specific website. We find that internships are more likely to be paid when more closely associated with a specific occupation, when the local labor market has lower unemployment, and when the local and federal minimum...

Using a unique panel survey of final-year undergraduates at six of the largest universities in Mozambique, we study the wage premium associated with completing an undergraduate degree. Conditional on a very rich set of controls, including pre-degree earnings, objective measures of ability, and...

A large literature exploits geographic variation in the concentration of immigrants to identify their impact on a variety of outcomes. To address the endogeneity of immigrants' location choices, the most commonly-used instrument interacts national inflows by country of origin with immigrants'...

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...

Strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, have been the primary weapon used by the United States to combat the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This paper examines the dynamics of violence involving drone strikes and the Taliban/Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan from...

We present a novel theory that immigrants facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship by being willing and able to invest in new skills. Immigrants whose human capital is not immediately transferable to the host country face lower opportunity costs of investing in new skills or methods and will...