Immigration in High-Skill Labor Markets: The Impact of Foreign Students on the Earnings of Doctorates

NBER Working Paper No. 12085

Issued in March 2006

NBER Program(s):Labor Studies



The rapid growth in the number of foreign students enrolled in American universities has transformed the higher education system, particularly at the graduate level. Many of these newly minted doctorates remain in the United States after receiving their doctoral degrees, so that the foreign student influx can have a significant impact in the labor market for high-skill workers. Using data drawn from the Survey of Earned Doctorates and the Survey of Doctoral Recipients, the study shows that a foreign student influx into a particular doctoral field at a particular time had a significant and adverse effect on the earnings of doctorates in that field who graduated at roughly the same time. A 10 percent immigration-induced increase in the supply of doctorates lowers the wage of competing workers by about 3 to 4 percent. About half of this adverse wage effect can be attributed to the increased prevalence of low-pay postdoctoral appointments in fields that have softer labor market conditions because of large-scale immigration.

A non-technical summary of this paper is available in the December 2006 NBER Digest. You can sign up to receive the NBER Digest by email.



References as Text (20 K)

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w12085

Published:



Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these: