Abstracts Economics

Essays on Immigration & Education Economics

by Town Oh

My three chapters are all related to the study of immigrants in how they impact the US economy. The first two chapters look at international students in particular and how they impact their domestic peers and the local college towns they reside in. The third chapter looks at immigrant workers and their effect on native workers’ propensity to consolidate to form labor unions. To be specific, the first chapter, titled How International students Affect Domestic Students’ Achievement: evidence from the OPT STEM-extension, looks at the role of immigrants in shaping the educational outcome of domestic students pursuing STEM degrees in the United States. By utilizing the mass influx of international students after an immigration policy change (OPT-STEM-extension) in 2008, I investigate the peer effects that international students have on grades, attrition, and first-year salary of STEM graduates. I account for the common selection issues present in the peer-effects literature by looking at the yearly exogenous change in international student share in a specific course-instructor pair and controlling for rich individual ability and demographics. This was made possible by having access to administrative data of a land-grant university with one of the highest international student enrollments in the US. I find that international students tend to lower grades and persistence of domestic students in STEM. Still, this negative effect is more than compensated for in the increase in salary due to spill-over effects in learning for those who persist and graduate. My research aims to eventually aid policymakers in both the local educational institutions and the federal government. To this end, I have extended my analysis of international students by shifting my focus outside the classroom to the local economies of the college campuses. In my second chapter, titled International Students’ Effect on Local Businesses, I use the zip code-level Census data on small businesses to see how the influx of international students affected the regional college campuses. I find that international students have a significantly positive effect on job creation in the local economy. To my knowledge, this is the first data-driven-causal analysis of international students on local businesses in the US. 12 My third chapter is a co-authored work with Alex Nowrasteh and Artem Samiahulin titled Immigrants Reduce Unionization in the US. Here we attempt to relate immigrants to a more traditional labor economics topic: labor unions. Although there is a vast amount of literature on unions, we found that the literature that causally estimates immigrants’ effect on unions is severely lacking in the US setting. Using a combination of representative data such as the CPS, Census, and the ACS, we show that immigrants accounted for about…