The first essay of this dissertation shows that highly skilled immigrants can have a significant and positive impact on an economy;;s rate of innovation.We find in the context of the H-1B visa program that innovation increases primarily with the contributions of the immigrants themselves and that these workers have little displacement effects on native inventors.This work addresses an open area of research in both the areas of immigration and innovation.Given the centrality of immigration to innovation in the US as well as the significant debate over immigration policy in the US, Europe, and other countries, our work addresses a question of first-order importance for understanding the effects of international labor mobility.The second chapter addresses the rise in the number of varieties of goods traded worldwide.In particular, we consider a natural explanation for why we have seen such significant foreign market entry by firms across a large number of countries since the 1980s: that barriers to entering foreign markets have fallen over time.Using data from the US Census we argue that this is in fact not the case.Our estimations find that the up-front costs associated with entering foreign markets have stayed relatively stable over time.We maintain that shifts in other determinants of export behavior are what drove the large scale entry that we see in the data.The final essay considers the determinants of firm political activity.In particular, we look at firms;; lobbying of the federal government.These activities represent the primary way in which firms attempt to change government policy in their favor.We find significant evidence that up-front costs of beginning to lobby help explain several stylized facts about firm political behavior.Our work confirms a long standing hypothesis in the political science literature.
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