Low-Wage Jobs, Foreign-Born Workers, and Firm Performance

Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, Esther Arenas-Arroyo, Parag Mahajan and Bernhard Schmidpeter
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Esther Arenas-Arroyo

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: We examine how migrant workers impact firm performance using administrative data from the United States. Exploiting an unexpected change in firms’ likelihood of securing low-wage workers through the H-2B visa program, we find limited crowd-out of other forms of employment and no impact on average pay at the firm. Yet, access to H-2B workers raises firms’ annual revenues and survival likelihood. Our results are consistent with the notion that guest worker programs can help address labor shortages without inflicting large losses on incumbent workers.

Keywords: guest workers; migrants; employment; firm dynamics; H-2B visa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J23 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2024-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2024/adrm/ces/CES-WP-24-05.pdf First version, 2024 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Low-Wage Jobs, Foreign-Born Workers, and Firm Performance (2023)
Working Paper: Low-wage jobs, foreign-born workers, and firm performance (2023)
Working Paper: Low-wage jobs, foreign-born workers, and firm performance (2023)
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:cen:wpaper:24-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dawn Anderson (dawn.m.anderson@census.gov).