Immigration policy can have important net fiscal effects that vary by immigrants’ skill level. But mainstream methods to estimate these effects are problematic. Methods based on cash-flow accounting offer precision at the cost of bias; methods based on general equilibrium modeling address bias with ...

The US limits work visas for low-skill jobs outside of agriculture, with a binding quota that firms access via a randomized lottery. We evaluate the marginal impact of the quota on firms entering the 2021 H-2B visa lottery using a novel survey and pre-analysis plan. Firms exogenously authorized to e...

International migrants who seek protection also participate in the economy. Thus the policy of the United States to drastically reduce refugee and asylum-seeker arrivals from 2017 to 2020 might have substantial and ongoing economic consequences. This paper places conservative bounds on those effects...

The past several decades have witnessed a rebirth of global labor mobility. Workers have begun to move between countries at rates not seen since before World War One. During the same period, economists’ study of international migration has been framed by a particular textbook model of location choic...

How many immigrants with less than university education, for a given immigration quota, maximise economic output? The answer is simple—zero—in the canonical model of the labour market, where the marginal product of a university-educated immigrant is always higher. We build an alternative model, foll...

The demand for skills exceeds supply, both within the Pacific Islands and the high-income countries of the Pacific Rim. Enhancing skilled migration therefore has the potential to generate large economic gains. The Global Skill Partnership is a migration model that can support such mutually beneficia...

This case study is one of three in a recent report by CGD and the World Bank, outlining how CGD’s Global Skill Partnership model could be applied to boost the number of skilled professionals in Nigeria and Europe. This piece focuses on the construction sector. It explores how the model could be used...