H1B visa policy

You are to write an 8- to 12-page paper that examines a public policy initiative and its impact on
a specific labor market. The public policy initiative can be at the federal or state level and could
be specifically targeted to impact a labor market or simply impact labor markets as a by-product
of the stated purpose. Examples of the former include minimum wage changes, changes to the
EITC program, or education promotion policies. Examples of the latter might be health care
policy or trade initiatives. There are many examples of important policy measures in the
textbook, both in the chapters we have read and in those that we have not. You should find one
that interests you. That said, any specific initiative or policy can only be selected by one student
and will be claimed by students on the designated Canvas discussion thread (link found in
assignments and Week 8 module).
Your final paper should integrate a number of important elements. It should have a thorough
description of the initiative and its purpose, a description of the labor market you plan to
examine, a summary of the economic research that has been done examining this initiative or
others like it and their findings, a description of the data you’ll be using, and what you find in the
data. Your data analysis is not expected to be sophisticated, but instead a naïve look at trends
and comparisons of groups who should be affected by the policy (treatment group) and those that
should not (control group). Visual examination of the graphical evidence and simple differencein-difference examinations will suffice.
To find relevant, published economics papers, I suggest using the library’s Econ-Lit database
(link) to identify papers related to your policy. Once you have found a few relevant papers, you
can use their reference lists to find earlier work and find more recent work by using Google
Scholar’s Cited by tool to identify papers that cite the ones you have found. For the data you’ll
use in your analysis, I strongly suggest that you use Census or ACS data from the IPUMs
database since you are already familiar with that data source.
Preliminary Assignments:
In order to help pace you in preparing your project and make sure you are on the right track,
there will be three smaller assignments that will include components of your final project. First,
you must identify the specific policy you would like to study and “claim” it on the Canvas
discussion thread. You must be sure that your policy has not been selected by another student
before you enter it in the discussion thread.
The second assignment will include two important components. The first is a thorough
description of your policy initiative which should include the purpose of the law, when it was
enacted and implemented, and who was the targeted population. The second component of the
second preliminary assignment is a summary of the data you will use for the project. This
description should include the groups you plan to use as your treated group and control group,