Low-Skilled Worker Shortages and Firm Performance
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, Esther Arenas-Arroyo, Parag Mahajan and Bernhard Schmidpeter
We examine how access low-skilled worker shortages affects firm employment and performance. We match data on H-2B visa applications from the Office of Foreign Labor Certification at the Department of Labor (DoL) with administrative, firm-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We then exploit an unexpected change in DoL processing of H-2B visa requests in January of 2018 that altered the likelihood that a firm's H-2B visa requests were ultimately approved. Our findings suggest that access to temporary, foreign-born workers through the H-2B visa program generate near one-for-one increases in employment, increases in revenues, and increases in short-run profits. These results are consistent with the notion that guest worker programs address labor shortages.
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, Esther Arenas-Arroyo, Parag Mahajan and Bernhard Schmidpeter
We examine how access low-skilled worker shortages affects firm employment and performance. We match data on H-2B visa applications from the Office of Foreign Labor Certification at the Department of Labor (DoL) with administrative, firm-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We then exploit an unexpected change in DoL processing of H-2B visa requests in January of 2018 that altered the likelihood that a firm's H-2B visa requests were ultimately approved. Our findings suggest that access to temporary, foreign-born workers through the H-2B visa program generate near one-for-one increases in employment, increases in revenues, and increases in short-run profits. These results are consistent with the notion that guest worker programs address labor shortages.