Emerging Markets Theme Research Seminar: Julia Zhu

Julia Zhu is a PhD candidate in Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. 

On the move: How comparative immigration policies shape migration decisions in a globalized world

How high-skilled immigrants make migration decisions in the context of globalization? In these two papers, I demonstrate the importance of studying immigration policies in a comparative framework. In the first paper, I focus on the comparative immigration policies for international students in the U.K. and the U.S. I examine the causal effect of international student enrollment on college completion of U.S. domestic students by leveraging a restrictive immigration policy change in the U.K. that induced more international students from former British colonies to enroll in U.S. universities. Using newly obtained administrative data on all international students in the U.S. between 2003 and 2015, I find that an additional international student per program leads to 0.7 more domestic students to obtain a college degree four years later. The effect is concentrated in public four-year institutions. Additionally, I find positive cross-degree-level effect of international students in master's degree programs on U.S. domestic students in bachelor's degree programs. The positive impact is most likely through cross-subsidization of tuition, serving as evidence of resource effects. In the second paper, I focus on the comparative immigration policies for high-skilled immigrants in the U.S. and Canada. The current U.S. immigration quota system that imposes limits on the number of green cards based on nationalities has not changed since 1991, while demand has increased exponentially. This results in long wait times for individuals from high demand countries. For employment-based green cards, in recent years, college-educated workers from India need to wait for over a decade before submitting applications. In contrast, Canada has implemented several favorable immigration policies to attract high-skilled immigrants. I examine the effect of this immigration policy gap on immigrant inflows and labor market outcomes in Canada. I first show that the adoption of Express Entry, Canada's point-based immigration program, significantly increases new economic immigrants from India. I then estimate the labor market impact of new immigrants using an instrumental variable strategy. Preliminary results show that the surge of new immigrants does not negatively affect employment in local labor markets.


Julia Zhu is an applied microeconomist. Her research interests are in labor economics, economics of migration, and economics of education.
Julia have several lines of active research that investigate the causes and effects of high-skilled immigration, local impacts of immigration enforcement policies, consequences of climate change and environmental shocks, attitude formation towards immigrants and racial minorities, and population estimation using demographic techniques.

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