Chad Sparber

Background

About Chad Sparber

My work explores the causes and consequences of U.S. immigration, usually distinguishing between workers of differing levels of educational attainment. Among workers with little educational attainment, my co-authors and I have found that although short-run GDP fluctuations pull immigrants into particular states, trend GDP is more important for pushing migrants out of their home countries. Importantly, we do not find evidence that such immigration reduces wages or pushes natives to move to new states in search of better labor market opportunities. Instead, our research notes that less-educated native and foreign-born workers are employed in strikingly different occupations. Native-born Americans specialize in communication-intense work, while immigrants specialize in manual labor. This helps native-born workers to effectively protect themselves from competition with immigrants. Immigration induces native-born workers to increasingly specialize in higher-paying communication occupations so that wage losses from immigration are small. In studying the market for highly educated labor, my co-authors and I have primarily concentrated on the consequences of the H-1B program, which grants temporary work permits for skilled workers. We find that by restricting temporary skilled immigration, the United States has also reduced the quality of international students considering a U.S. education. This effect is largely driven by a decline in the number of students from the top quintile of the ability distribution. In more recent work, we argue that the H-1B program has increased the productivity of the U.S. workforce and wages paid to college-educated natives without decreasing wages paid to non–college-educated workers