An important class of active labor market policy has received little impact evaluation: immigration barriers intended to raise wages and employment by shrinking labor supply. Theories of endogenous ...technical advance raise the possibility of limited or even perverse impact. We study a natural policy experiment: the exclusion of almost half a million Mexican bracero farm workers from the United States to improve farm labor market conditions. With novel labor market data we measure state-level exposure to exclusion, and model the absent changes in technology or crop mix. We fail to reject zero labor market impact, inconsistent with this model.
We explore how permanent residency affects personal income tax participation and net personal income tax payments using variation from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which ...authorized the largest U.S. amnesty to date. We exploit the timing and geographic unevenness of IRCA's legalization programs alongside newly digitized data on personal income taxes in California, home to the majority of applicants. Green Cards induced the previously unauthorized to file state income tax returns at rates comparable to other California residents. While the new returns generated little additional revenue through the end of the 1990s, they did raise the incomes of families with children through new claims of the federal Earned Income Tax Credit.
We examine whether low-skilled immigration to the United States has contributed to immigrants' residential isolation by reducing native demand for public schools. We address endogeneity in school ...demographics using established Mexican settlement patterns in California and use a comparison group to account for immigration's broader effects. We estimate that between 1970 and 2000, the average California school district lost more than 14 non-Hispanic households with children to other districts in its metropolitan area for every 10 additional households enrolling low-English Hispanics in its public schools. By disproportionately isolating children, the native reaction to immigration may have longer-run consequences than previously thought.
How much can late schooling investments close racial and ethnic skill gaps? We investigate this question by exploiting the large differences in completed schooling that arise among teenagers with ...birthdays near school-entry cutoff dates. We estimate that an additional year of high school raises the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) scores of minorities in the NLSY 79 by 0.31 to 0.32 standard deviations. These estimates imply that closing existing racial and ethnic gaps in schooling could close skill gaps by between 25 and 50 percent. Our approach also uncovers a significant direct effect of season of birth on test scores, suggesting that previous estimates using season of birth as an instrument for schooling are biased.
It is often asserted that a highly educated workforce is vital to improving the competitive position of American businesses, especially by boosting entrepreneurship. To examine this contention, we ...use population Census data and a new panel data of startup firms, to examine how the education and skill level of the local labor force are related to the creation and success of new businesses. This paper studies relationship between education, entrepreneurship, and businesses outcomes, and considers simultaneously both the education of the entrepreneur and of the workforce where the entrepreneurs operate their businesses. Consistent with this simultaneous focus, our initial results indicate that more educated entrepreneurs tend to be located in metropolitan areas with more educated workforces. Moreover, highly educated areas have above average entrepreneurship rates. Finally, the level of education of entrepreneurs is strongly related to positive business outcomes, especially for college graduates compared to those with less than a four-year degree.
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