Trade Diversion

Michael Clemens:

A quirk in the administrative process for granting temporary skilled-worker visas to the United States in 2007 and 2008 caused the U.S. government to randomize which visa applications it processed. This resulted in an exogenous change in the country of location for those workers. The effect of location on earnings is established by following the winners and losers of the visa lottery in the personnel records of a single major multinational software firm…
Location alone accounts for roughly three quarters of international wage gaps in this occupation. Under plausible assumptions about competition in the industry, and given the near-perfect tradability of the output, these findings suggest large differences in worker productivity caused exclusively by local, nontraded inputs accessible in different countries.

Management Science, Vol. 56, No. 5, May 2010, pp. 745–765, pdf

We find that after controlling for their human capital attributes, foreign IT professionals (those without U.S. citizenship and those with H-1B or other work visas) earn a salary premium when compared with IT professionals with U.S. citizenship. The salary premiums for non-U.S. citizens and for those on work visas fluctuate in response to supply shocks created by the annual caps on new H-1B visas. Setting lower and fully utilized annual caps results in higher salary premiums for non-U.S. citizens and those with work visas…

Collectively, the presence of salary premiums for foreign professionals even when a visa cap is under-utilized and the fact that H-1B professionals’ salary premiums are more directly affected by H-1B visa restrictions than that of green card holders imply that (1) foreign IT professionals are complements of American IT professionals, and (2) H-1B professionals may be substitutes for each other because a reduction in their supply affects their wages much more than that of green card holders.

“Would Americans put up with a program that inhibits them from working in London or Paris? Skilled African migrants don’t need international organizations suggesting restrictions on where they should live and work either.” – Laura Freschi

Michael Clemens in the Washington Post on Haiti and immigration:

In research I conducted with economists Claudio Montenegro and Lant Pritchett,we compared how much Haitians earn in the United States vs. Haiti. A moderately educated adult male, born and schooled in Haiti, typically enjoys a standard of living more than six times greater in the United States than in his homeland. In other words, U.S. policy wipes out more than 80 percent of a Haitian’s earning power when it keeps him from coming to the United States. This affects everything from the food he can buy to the construction materials he can afford. The difference has nothing to do with his ability or effort; it results purely from where he is.

HT: MR.

Giovanni Peri & Francisco Requena have a new NBER working paper:

There is abundant evidence that immigrant networks are associated with larger exports from the country where they settle to their countries of origin. The direction of causality of this association is less clearly established… Using micro data on individual trade transactions from Spanish provinces between 1995 and 2008 and data on the stock of immigrants in those provinces by country of origin… we find that immigrants significantly increase exports (elasticity of 0.10), that the effect is almost entirely due to an increase in the extensive margin and that the effect is somewhat stronger for differentiated goods.

Gallup finds about 16% of the world’s adults would like to move to another country permanently if they had the chance. [Note that the map is misleading, as the regional average response is imputed onto all countries in the region.]

HT: Richard Florida.