Vanishing Borders in the Internet Age: The Income Elasticity of the Supply of Foreign Labor in Virtual versus Physical Markets

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2018-01-03

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This study investigates how the supply of foreign labor in virtual versus physical markets responds to monetary incentives using information on digital labor flows from a major global online labor platform for IT services in conjunction with data on physical labor flows into the United States. We use exogenous changes in the exchange rate as a source of identification: a depreciation of a country’s currency against the US dollar exogenously increases the incentives of its workers to seek employment in the United States. Our results suggest that monetary incentives, measured as a depreciation of a country’s currency against the US dollar, have a substantial impact on the supply of foreign labor in virtual markets. However, we do not find that monetary incentives have a statistically significant impact on the supply of foreign labor in physical markets, which might be expected since physical migration faces substantial bureaucratic restrictions and transaction costs.

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Strategy, Information, Technology, Economics, and Society (SITES), Online labor markets, foreign labor supply, exchange rate, migration

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9 pages

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Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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