The Effects of High-Skilled Immigration Policy on Firms: Evidence from Visa Lotteries

This is a greatly revised version of NBER Working Paper 20668, previously titled “The Effect of High-Skilled Immigration on Patenting and Employment: Evidence from H-1B Visa Lotteries.” We thank U.S. Customs and Immigration Services for help with the H-1B lottery data. We thank Sunil Vidhani for outstanding research assistance. We thank Notre Dame and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for research support. We are grateful to George Borjas, John Bound, Sean Farhang, Richard Freeman, Hilary Hoynes, Jenny Hunt, Damon Jones, Larry Katz, Bill Kerr, Norman Matloff, Ankur Patel, Dina Pomeranz, Jesse Rothstein, and seminar participants at the Fed Board, HBS, NBER, CEMIR, U.S. Treasury, and WIGE for helpful comments. We thank Lee Fleming for sharing the patent data with us. We thank Danny Yagan for sharing his code to probabilistically identify natives and foreigners in the Treasury data. The views in this paper are solely the responsibility of the authors and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of the U.S. Treasury Department, any other person associated with the U.S. Treasury Department, or the National Bureau of Economic Research. All errors are our own.

• November 7, 2014
• March 10, 2015
• June 18, 2015