How do Employment Verification Mandates Impact U.S. Agriculture?
Boysel, Samuel.
2016
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Abstract: Employment verification mandates require firms to prove each new hire's legal right to work in the U.S. and sanction employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers. The effects of such policies are of particular concern to the agricultural sector, which draws from a labor pool in which undocumented workers have been historically overrepresented. This paper empirically estimates the ... read moreimpact of state-level mandates on farm outcomes. By exploiting geographic variation in statewide E-Verify mandates implemented between 2007 and 2012, I use an identification strategy that combines both differences-in-differences and regression discontinuity techniques to isolate the effect of E-Verify on agricultural labor patterns. While addressing a number of estimation challenges, I find that worker density falls by roughly 35% at the policy-change border for states with stringent mandates. Furthermore, the average farm spends less per worker within counties adjacent to this same set of E-Verify states, suggesting some presence of spillover effects.
Thesis (M.S.)--Tufts University, 2016.
Submitted to the Dept. of Economics.
Advisor: Jeffrey Zabel.
Committee: Sahar Parsa, and Gilbert Metcalf.
Keywords: Economics, Agriculture economics, and Labor economics.read less - ID:
- k0698k58r
- Component ID:
- tufts:21181
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- TARC Citation Guide EndNote