Productivity of highly skilled immigrants: Economists in the postwar period

Prior work finds declining immigrant quality in the postwar period that is linked to source-country and skill-composition changes associated with the 1965 Immigration Act. This paper uses a unique panel of foreign- and native-bent American Economic Association members to show that the highly skilled experienced a similar shift away from European migrants toward those from Asia. However the findings do not indicate that this change in source-country composition has been accompanied by a decline in quality rather the most recent cohorts of foreign-born economists appear to be more productive than their native counterparts. (JEL J61).