Immigration and Business Dynamics: Evidence from U.S. Firms

The Impact of Immigration on Firms and Workers: Insights from the H-1B Lottery

“…28 Similar frameworks have been applied to study firm-level immigration. For example, see Waugh (2017), Clemens and Lewis (2022), Mahajan (2024), and Brinatti and Morales (2023).…”

“…A nascent, growing literature studies the impact of immigrant workers on firm performance and the role of the firm in determining the economic impact of immigration using employer-level data (see, e.g., Amuedo-Dorantes et al, 2023a;Arellano-Bover and San, 2023;Brinatti and Morales, 2023;Brinatti and Guo, 2023;Clemens and Lewis, 2022;Doran et al, 2022;Kerr et al, 2015;Mahajan, 2024;Mayda et al, 2020;Mitaritonna et al, 2017). To our knowledge, the only other paper using the LEHD to study the impact of skilled immigration on firms is Kerr et al (2015), who study how changes to the H-1B cap affected employment composition within a sample of 319 large firms.…”

The Effect of Low-Skill Immigration Restrictions on Us Firms and Workers: Evidence from a Randomized Lottery

“…A range of models imply that firm-level scale effects should be considered a lower bound on aggregate effects (e.g. di Mahajan 2022).…”

“…The variation in exposure to immigrant employment that we study is exogenous by design. This is desirable relative to what is by far the most common approach to causal identification in the literature on low-skill immigration: constructing 'shift-share' instrumental variables based on lagged patterns of immigrant presence across geographic areas (Card 1990;Altonji and Card 1991;Burchardi et al 2018;Monras 2020;Piyapromdee 2020;Kim et al 2022) or across firms (Lewis 2011;Olney 2013;Dustmann and Glitz 2015;Mitaritonna et al 2017;Burstein et al 2020;Gray et al 2020;Imbert et al 2022;Mahajan 2022)-either alone or in combination with shocks at the migrant origin. One limitation of this approach is well recognized: Some of the same unobserved traits of geographic areas that attracted immigrants in the past can persist, producing confounding variation in the outcome of interest at present.…”

Low-Wage Jobs, Foreign-Born Workers, and Firm Performance

“…Most studies evaluating the impact of "low-skill" immigration focus on worker-level outcomes or market-level outcomes derived from worker-level data (e.g., Borjas, 2003;Dustmann et al, 2017;Clemens et al, 2018;Abramitzky et al, 2022;East et al, 2023). In contrast, most of the research using firm-level data focuses on the hiring of "high-skilled" immigrant workers, mainly through the H-1B program (e.g., Kerr and Lincoln, 2010;Peri, 2012;Pekkala Kerr et al, 2015;Peri et al, 2015;Doran et al, 2022;Brinatti et al, 2023) or on market-level immigration shocks (e.g., Dustmann and Glitz, 2015;Mitaritonna et al, 2017;Ayromloo et al, 2020;Orefice and Peri, 2020;Beerli et al, 2021;Brinatti and Morales, 2021;Mahajan, 2022). A singular exception is Clemens and Lewis (2022), who examine the effect of the 2021 H-2B visa lottery using a survey of participant firms.…”