Looking for the "Best and Brightest": Hiring difficulties and high-skilled foreign workers

No 1934, AMSE Working Papers from Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France

Abstract: This paper shows that firms' demand for high-skilled foreign workers partly results from their hiring difficulties. Relying on a within-firm identification strategy, I compare recruitment decisions made by a given employer for similar jobs differing in recruitment difficulties. I quantify how the time to fill a vacancy affects the employer's probability to look for recruiting a foreign worker. To identify this relationship, I have collected and assembled a new and original dataset at the job level. It matches online job postings to administrative data on H-1B visas applications in the US. I find that a standard deviation increase in job posting duration increases employers' probability to look for a foreign worker by 1.5 percentage points. This effect is mainly driven by firms sending only a few visa applications. It increases to 3 to 4 percentage points for architects, engineers and computer scientists.

Keywords: H-1B work permit; hiring difficulties; web scraping (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C26 J2 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 60 pages
Date: 2019-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-lab
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Related works:
Working Paper: Looking for the “Best and Brightest": Hiring difficulties and high-skilled foreign workers (2021)
Working Paper: Looking for the "Best and Brightest": Hiring difficulties and high-skilled foreign workers (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aim:wpaimx:1934

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