Essays on Immigration & Education Economics

<p>My three chapters are all related to the study of immigrants in how they impact the US</p> <p>economy. The first two chapters look at international students in particular and how they</p> <p>impact their domestic peers and the local college towns they reside in. The third chapter</p> <p>looks at immigrant workers and their effect on native workers’ propensity to consolidate to</p> <p>form labor unions.</p> <p>To be specific, the first chapter, titled How International students Affect Domestic Students’</p> <p>Achievement: evidence from the OPT STEM-extension, looks at the role of immigrants</p> <p>in shaping the educational outcome of domestic students pursuing STEM degrees</p> <p>in the United States. By utilizing the mass influx of international students after an immigration</p> <p>policy change (OPT-STEM-extension) in 2008, I investigate the peer effects that</p> <p>international students have on grades, attrition, and first-year salary of STEM graduates.</p> <p>I account for the common selection issues present in the peer-effects literature by looking</p> <p>at the yearly exogenous change in international student share in a specific course-instructor</p> <p>pair and controlling for rich individual ability and demographics. This was made possible</p> <p>by having access to administrative data of a land-grant university with one of the highest</p> <p>international student enrollments in the US. I find that international students tend to lower</p> <p>grades and persistence of domestic students in STEM. Still, this negative effect is more than</p> <p>compensated for in the increase in salary due to spill-over effects in learning for those who</p> <p>persist and graduate.</p> <p>My research aims to eventually aid policymakers in both the local educational institutions</p> <p>and the federal government. To this end, I have extended my analysis of international</p> <p>students by shifting my focus outside the classroom to the local economies of the college</p> <p>campuses. In my second chapter, titled International Students’ Effect on Local Businesses, I</p> <p>use the zip code-level Census data on small businesses to see how the influx of international</p> <p>students affected the regional college campuses. I find that international students have a</p> <p>significantly positive effect on job creation in the local economy. To my knowledge, this is</p> <p>the first data-driven-causal analysis of international students on local businesses in the US.</p> <p>12</p> <p>My third chapter is a co-authored work with Alex Nowrasteh and Artem Samiahulin</p> <p>titled Immigrants Reduce Unionization in the US. Here we attempt to relate immigrants to</p> <p>a more traditional labor economics topic: labor unions. Although there is a vast amount of</p> <p>literature on unions, we found that the literature that causally estimates immigrants’ effect</p> <p>on unions is severely lacking in the US setting. Using a combination of representative data</p> <p>such as the CPS, Census, and the ACS, we show that immigrants accounted for about onethird</p> <p>of the decline in unions since the 1980s. We based our paper on the theoretical model</p> <p>of Naylor and Cripps  1993  and borrowed George Borjas’s skill-cell method for our empirical</p> <p>method.(Borjas  2003 )</p>