Quotas and Quality: The Effect of H-1B Visa Restrictions on the Pool of Prospective Undergraduate Students from Abroad

Takao Kato and Chad Sparber

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2013, vol. 95, issue 1, 109-126

Abstract: In October 2003, the United States drastically reduced the number of H-1B visas available for foreign-born workers. Such restrictions could make U.S. colleges less attractive to foreign students considering an American education as a pathway to U.S. employment. Citizens from five countries are de facto exempt from the visa restrictions, however. Our difference-in-difference estimates show that restrictive immigration policy reduced SAT scores of international applicants by about 1.5% and decreased the number of SAT score reports sent by international students at the top quintile of the SAT score distribution. Restrictive immigration policy disproportionately discourages high-ability international students from pursuing education in the United States. © 2013 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: skilled immigration; immigrant selection; H-1B visa; college education; SAT scores (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 I20 I28 J61 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (67)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00245 link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Quotas and Quality: The Effect of H-1B Visa Restrictions on the Pool of Prospective Undergraduate Students from Abroad (2011)
Working Paper: Quotas and Quality: The Effect of H-1B Visa Restrictions on the Pool of Prospective Undergraduate Students from Abroad (2010)
Working Paper: Quotas and Quality: The Effect of H-1B Visa Restrictions on the Pool of Prospective Undergraduate Students from Abroad (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:restat:v:95:y:2013:i:1:p:109-126

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().