Labor Studies.

• Author: Card, David
• Position: Program Report

The Labor Studies (LS) Program is one of the largest and most active in the NBER, with almost 150 members producing nearly 200 Working Papers each year. The breadth of topics and expertise is stunning: it ranges from cutting edge research on aggregate labor market issues like unemployment and productivity to the effects of government programs like Disability Insurance, the differences in labor market outcomes among different educational, gender, and racial groups, and to many other topics in social science.

Reflecting their diversity, two-thirds of program members are affiliated with at least one other NBER program, and in the past few years the Labor Studies program has convened joint sessions at the NBER's Summer Institute with Public Economics, Economics of Education, Economics of Children, and with Working Groups in Personnel Economics and the Economics of Crime. This summer we will add a new joint session with Development Economics.

In this report I briefly summarize some of the main themes emerging from recent work by LS affiliates in three areas: immigration, gender, and unemployment. These topics barely scratch the surface of the vast body of work by LS affiliates, but give a flavor of some of the emerging ideas and latest techniques in the field.

Immigration

Over the past three decades, Labor Studies researchers have produced a series of major NBER research volumes on the economics of immigration (Abowd and Freeman, 1991; Borjas and Freeman, 1992; Borjas, 2000; and Borjas 2007) as well as many influential articles. This work continues with a focus on several new issues related to immigration.

One such issue relates to the growing importance of immigrants in the science and engineering workforce of the United States, particularly at the doctoral level, where immigrants now make up about one-half of all newly awarded Ph.D.s. John Bound, Sarah Turner, and Patrick Walsh (14792) point out that this has been driven in part by the rapid rise in the production of bachelors' degrees outside the United States, and they document its impact on the demand for advanced training inside the United States. Jeffrey Grogger and Gordon Hanson (18780) use data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates to study the determinants of which foreign-born students intend to stay in the United States. They find that the United States attracts the most talented foreign students, and they also show how changing economic conditions in sending countries affect the decision to stay. Using a unique survey of authors of recent scientific publications, Paula Stephan, Chiara Franzoni, and Giuseppe Scellato (18809) find that high prestige of the program or job and strong career prospects are the major factors driving the decisions of Ph.D. students and post-doctoral candidates to choose the United States over other potential host countries.

The impact of these foreign born scientists, engineers, and other highly trained workers...