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

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

Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii

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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