Kirk B. Doran

A Shred of Credible Evidence on the Long Run Elasticity of Labor Supply

Virtually all public policies regarding taxation and the redistribution of income rely on explicit or implicit assumptions about the long run effect of wage rates on labor supply. The available estimates of the wage elasticity of male labor supply in the literature have varied between -0.2 and 0.2, implying that permanent wage increases have relatively small, poorly determined effects on labor supplied. The variation in existing estimates calls for a simple, natural experiment in which men can change their hours of work, and in which wages have been exogenously and permanently changed. We introduce a panel data set of taxi drivers who choose their own hours, and who experienced two exogenous permanent fare increases instituted by the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, and we use these data to fit a simple structural labor supply function. Our estimates suggest that the elasticity of labor supply is about -0.2, implying that income effects dominate substitution effects in the long run labor supply of males.

Which Peers Matter? The Relative Impacts of Collaborators, Colleagues, and Competitors

Many economists believe knowledge production generates positive spillovers among knowledge producers. The available evidence, however, is mixed. We argue that spillovers can exist along three dimensions: idea, geographic, and collaboration space. To isolate the key channel through which knowledge spills over, we use a unique data set to examine the impact of a large post-1992 exodus of Soviet mathematicians on the output of the nonémigrés. Although the data reveal strong competitive effects in idea space, there is evidence of knowledge spillovers in collaboration space, when high-quality researchers directly engage with other researchers in the joint production of new knowledge.

The Effects of High-Skilled Immigration Policy on Firms: Evidence from H-1b Visa Lotteries

We study the effect of a firm winning an additional H-1B visa on the firm’s outcomes, by comparing winning and losing firms in the Fiscal Year 2006 and 2007 H-1B visa lotteries. We match administrative data on the participants in these lotteries to the universe of approved U.S. patents, and to IRS data on the universe of U.S. firms. Winning additional H-1B visas has insignificant effects on firms’ patenting and use of the research and experimentation tax credit, with confidence intervals that generally rule out more than modest effects. Additional H-1Bs cause at most a moderate increase in firms’ overall employment, and these H-1Bs substantially crowd out firms’ employment of other workers. There is some evidence that additional H-1Bs lead to lower average employee earnings and higher firm profits.

How Does Child Labor Affect the Demand for Adult Labor?: Evidence from Rural Mexico

Do employers substitute adults for children, or do they treat them as complements? Using data from a Mexican schooling experiment, I find that decreasing child farmwork is accompanied by increasing adult labor demand. This increase was not caused by treatment money reaching farm employers: there were no significant increases in harvest prices and quantities, nonlabor inputs, or nonfarm labor supply. Furthermore, coordinated movements in price and quantity can distinguish this increase in demand from changes in supply induced by the treatments income effects. Thus, declining child supply caused increasing adult demand: employers substituted adults for children.

Ethnic Complementarities After the Opening of China: How Chinese Graduate Students Affected the Productivity of Their Advisors

ABSTRACT:The largest flow of scientific talent in the world is the migration of international students to universities in industrialized countries. We use the opening of China in 1978 to estimate this flows causal effect on the productivity of their professors in the United States. Our identification relies on both the suddenness of Chinas opening and on a key feature of scientific production: intra-ethnic collaboration. The increased access that Chinese-American advisors had to a new talent pool led to an increase in their productivity, in both coauthorships and solo-authored papers. Comparable non-Chinese advisors mentored fewer non-Chinese students and published fewer papers.

How High-Skill Immigration Affects Science: Evidence from the Collapse of the USSR

A commonly cited reason for increasing high-skill immigration to the United States is the perceived positive impact that such immigrants would have on the course of US science. While it is true that scientific research is particularly important for long-term economic well-being, and while it is also true that immigrants have historically accounted for a disproportionate share of US scientific output, the causal impact of an increase in the number of high-skill immigrants on US science is not obvious. An influx of new knowledge and knowledge-generating workers may generate knowledge spillovers: the productivity-enhancing peer effects that must be present if high-skill immigration is to have beneficial long-run effects. However, scientists must also compete for scarce resources such as jobs, journal space, and attention in order for their research to be produced, disseminated, and used. This paper reviews the evidence we report in recent work (Borjas and Doran 2012, 2014) that simultaneously addresses both of these conflicting forces. The research uses the “natural experiment” created by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to the largest sudden influx of scientific personnel and ideas into the United States since World War II. In this context, there is little evidence of improved productivity among preexisting scientists after a sizable supply and idea shock.