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Web Design ProgramAbstract: Integration of immigrants into their host society is at the core of the public debate in most OECD countries. Immigrant integration includes two distinct dimensions: cultural and economic integration. This paper investigates the interplay between these two processes and presents three main results. First, it documents that immigrants from more culturally distant countries earn lower wages when they enter the German labor market. Second, it highlights that these wage differences progressively diminish over years spent in Germany and even disappear in some cases. For instance, the wage gap associated with a one standard deviation difference in religious and genetic distance disappears after 15 to 20 years. Finally, the paper provides evidence that immigrants who experience a greater increase in cultural assimilation experience more wage growth as well. Taken together, these results suggest that the cultural assimilation process can benefit the economic integration of immigrants.
Abstract: We provide an estimate of the environmental impact of the recruitment system in the economics profession, known as the “international job market for economists”. Each year, most graduating PhDs seeking jobs in academia, government, or companies participate in this job market. The market follows a standardized process, where candidates are pre-screened in a short interview which takes place at an annual meeting in Europe or in the United States. Most interviews are arranged via a non-profit online platform, econjobmarket.org, which kindly agreed to share its anonymized data with us. Using this dataset, we estimate the individual environmental impact of 1057 candidates and one hundred recruitment committees who attended the EEA and AEA meetings in December 2019 and January 2020. We calculate that this pre-screening system generated the equivalent of about 4800 tons of avoidable CO2-eq and a comprehensive economic cost over €4.4 million. We contrast this overall assessment against three counterfactual scenarios: an alternative in-person system, a hybrid system (where videoconference is used for some candidates) and a fully online system (as it happened in 2020–21 due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Overall, the study can offer useful information to shape future recruitment standards in a more sustainable way.
Working paper: CEP Discussion paper (2021)
Media: VOX EU column, CentrePiece
Abstract: This note evaluates the scrambled questions penalty using multiple choice tests taken by first-year undergraduate students who follow a microeconomics introductory course. We provide new evidence that students perform worse at scrambled questionnaires than at logically ordered ones. We improve on previous studies by explicitly modeling students individual skills thanks to a fixed effects regression. We further show that the scrambled questions penalty does not differ along gender but varies along the distribution of students' skills and mostly affects students with lower-intermediate skills.
Abstract: While US Universities attract millions of international students, we do not know how many of them work in the US after graduating. In this paper we implement an instrumental variable estimation, using quasi-random variations in the tuition charged, and we estimate that between 2003 and 2017 one more international master (or bachelor) student, attracted by a University, increased the US skilled labor supply in the year of graduation by about 0.23 (0.11) employees. Only for STEM students such effect on labor supply was positive and significant, especially after the 2008 Optional Practical Training reform.
Media: The Chronicle of Higher Education, NBER Digest, Forbes
Abstract: This paper investigates the role of labor market tightness in the labor demand for high-skilled foreign workers in the US. In a first part, I show that employers used to submit LCAs as a first step to sponsor H-1B visas, search to recruit more educated and more experienced candidates than other employers recruiting on the same local labor market. I also show that they offer higher wages than competing recruiters. In a second part, I use a new IV strategy and document a positive causal impact of recruitment competition on the number of LCAs submitted by employer. The effect holds for most employers, but vanishes when the largest outsourcing companies are included in the analysis. These results are consistent with the notion that labor market tightness is another explanation for the absence of a crowding-out effect from high-skilled foreign workers against natives with similar skills.
Abstract: This paper shows that, on average, U.S. employers are more likely to seek foreign skilled workers for positions where finding domestic workers takes time. It uses a new dataset matching online job posting duration to administrative data on Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) submitted as the first step in applying for H-1B temporary skilled worker visas. It investigates the mechanisms by exploring the heterogeneity of the results across firms and labor markets. It shows that this relationship is not driven by firms manipulating their job postings’ duration to demonstrate their good faith efforts in their search for domestic workers. On the contrary, evidence suggest that the results are due to the insufficient domestic labor supply in tight occupations.
Media: Forbes
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