Aakansha Jain

The U.S. settled non-citizen agricultural workforce has declined substantially since the mid-2000s, while H-2A temporary guestworker certifications have grown more than fivefold over the same period. This paper asks whether the rise of H-2A reflects a causal response to the decline in settled farm labor, and estimates the substitution elasticity between the two workforces. Using a panel of settled non-citizen agricultural labor (PANCAL) constructed from the American Community Survey across 740 U.S. commuting zones over 2008-2024, I instrument for changes in the settled workforce using a shift-share design that interacts baseline 2000 non-citizen agricultural labor shares with two sources of national variation in immigration enforcement: Border Patrol budget shocks and agricultural-season border encounters. IV estimates imply that each settled non-citizen agricultural worker lost is replaced by 1.7 to 2.5 H-2A certifications (Hansen J p = 0.128). The findings show that the expansion of H-2A has been driven by the contraction of the settled farm workforce, reshaping the composition of U.S. agricultural labor and raising design questions for guestworker policy.

This paper traces how the college-versus-high-school earnings gap evolved in India during the decades when tertiary enrollment expanded rapidly. Drawing on five waves of the National Sample Survey, I estimate conventional Mincer wage equations and complement them with two-part Cragg models that separate the extensive margin (labor-force participation) from the intensive margin (weekly pay, conditional on work). Repeated cross-sections are organized into synthetic birth cohorts to track wage premiums over time. The college premium rose throughout the sample period despite a near-tripling of tertiary enrollment, and rose unevenly across cohorts: older cohorts continue to command rising premiums while the youngest has begun to flatten.