U-M graduate student Nicolas Morales received the NBER Pre-Doctoral Fellowship on the Economics of High-Skill Immigration for the 2017-2018 academic year. Morales was awarded based on his project, “Multinational Companies and
the Demand for Foreign High-Skill Labor.”

“I was thrilled to learn I got the NBER fellowship, not only because of the financial support which is obviously very helpful but also because the selection committee was formed by very prestigious economists I admire such as George Borjas, William Kerr, Thomas Lemieux, Paula Stephan, and Sarah Turner,” says Morales.

This project aims to answer the question of how restrictions to skilled labor flows between countries shape total production, innovation and location decisions of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the United States. The
new mechanism I incorporate is that multinationals need foreign labor to transfer knowledge from the parent to the affiliate, so when migration becomes more costly the location of production might change as a result of that. I will estimate a quantitative multi-country model that allows me to answer this question.

The pre-doctoral fellowship, awarded by NBER, was made possible through the generosity of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.