Full Citation
Title: Three Essays on Migration and Public Policy
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2018
ISBN: 9780355965230
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Abstract: My first chapter investigates the effect of high-skilled immigration on the wages of US-born college graduates. Descriptive evidence suggests that workers with different college majors compete in separate labor markets. I adapt a standard labor market model, allowing for the imperfect substitutability of workers with different college majors. Because immigrants are more likely than natives to study STEM fields, the model predicts that the relative wages of native STEM majors should fall as skilled immigration increases. Using an IV strategy that leverages large changes in the cap of H-1B visas and controls for major- and age-specific unobservable characteristics, I find that workers most exposed to increased competition from immigration have lower wages than you would expect. A 10 percentage point increase in a skill group’s immigrant-native ratio decreases their relative wages by 1.2 percent. Overall, I estimate that the STEM wage premium decreased 4–12 percentage points because of immigration from 1990–2010. In my second chapter, I extend the welfare magnets literature by using the 2014 expansion of Medicaid to test for welfare migration. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act mandated the expansion of Medicaid. However, a Supreme Court decision overturned this provision and allowed states to opt-out. As a result, childless adults with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty level are eligible for Medicaid in states that have expanded coverage and are not eligible at any income level in the majority of states that opted to not expand. Using a difference-in-differences strategy which compares the log estimated low-income population of expansion and non-expansion states, before and after Medicaid expansion, I find that the low-income population increased by 1% in expansion states after 2012 relative to what one would expect given pre-existing trends and post-decision population changes in non-expansion states. This result is robust to the use of state-level synthetic control. I also find that Medicaid take-up in expansion states increased more along the border of the state relative to the interior, which is driven by portions of the state that neighbor non-expansion states.
Url: https://search.proquest.com/docview/2048361394/previewPDF/7AB829E91A3244D3PQ/1?accountid=14586
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Authors: Turner, Patrick, S
Institution: University of Colorado at Boulder
Department: Economics
Advisor: Barham, Tania; Cadena, Brian
Degree: Ph.D.
Publisher Location: Boulder, Colorado, USA
Pages: 192
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Education, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other
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