Loss of Peers and Individual Worker Performance: Evidence From H-1B Visa Denials

The Institute of Economics will hold a seminar meeting as part of its Seminar Series on Tuesday, December 12, 2023: Astrid Marinoni from Georgia Institute of Technology will present the paper “Loss of Peers and Individual Worker Performance: Evidence From H-1B Visa Denials".

Abstract:

We study how restrictive immigration policies that result in the unexpected loss of co-workers affect the performance of skilled migrants employed in organizations. Specifically, we examine the impact of the loss of team members on their co-workers' performance in response to the unexpectedly increased denials of extensions of H-1B work visas in the United States beginning in 2017. Losing a team member generally has a positive albeit economically insignificant effect on the performance of workers left behind. However, we find that individuals who lost peers of the same ethnic background experience a substantial decrease in their performance. To confirm that our results are not plagued by the presence of unobservable team or individual features that might impact visa-denial decisions, we build an instrumental variable that exploits the fixed duration of the H-1B visa. Heterogeneity analyses suggest that our result is driven by workers in small teams, teams working on atypical tasks, and ethnically homogeneous teams. These analyses hint at the fact that ethnic ties may boost individual performance through preferential channels of knowledge and information spillovers.

The Seminar will be held in Aula 6.

For online partecipation use this link.