Maison des Sciences Humaines
11, Porte des Sciences
L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette / Belval
Black Box, MSH Ground Floor
seminars@liser.lu
Abstract
The Contribution of Foreign Master's Students to US Start-Ups
Authors: Giovanni Peri, Michel Beine, Morgan Raux
We estimate the contribution of foreign-born graduate students to the creation of innovative start-ups in the US. Our analysis is focused on Master's students, the largest group of start-up founders among foreign students, and combines information on foreign students graduating from Master's programs by university cohort with data on start-ups founded in the US over the period 1999-2019. To establish a causal link, we use idiosyncratic variation in out-of-state relative to in-state fees charged by universities across cohorts, resulting in differential foreign enrollment. We also use changes in the share of foreign students predicted by a shift-share instrument, based on university-level past networks, as an additional identification strategy. For each additional percentage point of foreign students graduating in a Master's cohort, we find 0.04 more start-ups founded by that cohort, which corresponds to an increase of one third of the average. Additionally, we find that between 55 and 70\% of this effect is due to the larger average start-up propensity of foreign-born students, while 30 to 45\% of the total effect is attributable to a positive spillover on US native Master's graduates, who become more likely to co-found start-ups.
The Labor Demand Effects of Refugee Immigration: Theory and Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Authors: Herbert Brücker, Paul Berbée, Alfred Garloff, Andreas, Hauptmann, Katrin Sommerfeld
Immigration does not only affect labor supply, but also demand since consumption patterns of migrants differ relative to natives. We analyze these effects in a model with non-homothetic demand, i.e. a framework where demand depends on the levels and distribution of income. The model predicts that migration can increase the demand for labor-intensive goods and services and, hence, aggregate employment and wages. We apply this framework to refugee immigration in Germany, which enables us to isolate the labor demand effects of immigration on local labor markets by exploiting the fact that refugees in Germany are banned from working at first. For empirical identification we rely on the local presence of vacant military bases and on allocation quotas from a dispersal policy. The empirical results are in line with our theoretical predictions: Refugee immigration increases local employment in the short run through increased demand for locally produced goods, particularly in non-tradable sectors. Unemployment drops while individual wages do not change significantly. This study complements the literature that isolates labor supply shocks from immigration.
Biography
Giovanni Peri is the C. Bryan Cameron Distinguished Professor in International Economics at the University of California, Davis and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the Founder and the Director of the UC Davis Global Migration Center an interdisciplinary research center focusing on international migrations and migration policies. He was Co-Editor of the “Journal of the European Economic Association” between January 2019 and December 2023, and in the Editorial Board of several Academic Journals in Economics.
https://giovanniperi.ucdavis.edu/
Herbert Brücker is Head of the Research Department for Migration, Integration and International Labour Studies at IAB since 2005 (since January 2023 together with Yuliya Kosyakova) and Professor of Economics at Humboldt University Berlin since 2018. He is also Director of the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research (BIM) at Humboldt University.
