Every year, the United States uses a lottery to grant H-1B status to highly-educated immigrants. In a new at the Institute of Labor Economics in Germany, Rishi Sharma and Chad Sparber argue that the random nature of this allocation scheme causes firms to waste millions of dollars searching for far more workers than they actually intend to hire. The Cato Institute recently released a summarizing the paper’s findings for a general audience.
January 18, 2021