In the United States, rural and low-income communities have difficulty attracting and retaining physicians, potentially adversely impacting health outcomes. With a limited supply of physicians completing medical school at US universities, foreign-born and educated physicians provide a potential source of supply in underserved areas. For international medical school graduates (IMGs) the terms of the commonly used J-1 visa require a return to the home country for two years following employment in medical residency. Our analysis examines the extent to which the Conrad 30 Visa Waiver impacts the supply of physicians at state and local levels, particularly in areas designated as medically underserved. Changes in the federal limit on the number of waivers per state, combined with variation in the state-level restrictions on eligible specialties, and geographies in which physicians can work, provide evidence on the role of visa restrictions in limiting the supply of doctors. Expansion of the cap on visa waivers increased the supply of IMGs, particularly in states that did not limit waiver recipients to primary care physicians or particular places of employment. There is little evidence of reductions in US-trained doctors in states where IMG increases were the largest, suggesting little evidence for crowding out.

We highlight a lesser-known consequence of China’s integration into the world economy: the rise of services trade. We demonstrate how the US’s trade deficit in goods cycles back as a surplus in US exports of education services. Focusing on China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, we show that Chinese cities more exposed to trade liberalization sent more students to US universities. Growth in housing income/wealth allowed Chinese families to afford US tuition, and more students financed their studies using personal funds. Our estimates suggest that recent trade wars could cost US universities around $1.1 bn in annual tuition revenue.

The economic consequences of large-scale government investments in education depend on general equilibrium effects in both the labor market and education sector. I develop a general equilibrium model that captures the consequences of massive countrywide schooling initiatives. I provide unbiased estimates of the model’s elasticities using a Regression Discontinuity design derived from Indian government policy. The earnings returns to a year of education are 13.4%, and the general equilibrium labor market effects are substantial: they depress the returns by 6.6 percentage points. These general equilibrium effects have distributional consequences across cohorts and skill groups: as a result of the policy, unskilled workers are better off and skilled workers worse off.

University learning has facilitated the flow of individuals and knowledge across national borders for centuries, but the recent scale of student flows and the magnitude of tuition revenues from foreign students across the globe is unprecedented. The number of students pursuing higher education degrees outside their home countries more than doubled between 2000 and 2017 to reach 5.3 million (UNESCO 2018).

We present the first estimates of the effects of higher education investments on lower levels of schooling. Using the roll-out of elite public colleges in India, we show that investments in higher education increased educational attainment among school-age children. Private schools entered districts with new elite public colleges, and students switched from public to private schools. In addition, elite public colleges crowded in investments in electricity, roads, and water services. We find suggestive evidence that public investments in infrastructure may have reduced setup costs for private schools, and consequently, travel costs for school-going children.

Affirmative action raises the likelihood of getting into college or obtaining a government job for minority social groups in India. I find that minority group students are incentivized to stay in school longer in response to changes in future prospects. To identify causal relationships, I leverage variation in group eligibility, school age cohorts, and state-level intensity of implementation in difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity designs. These estimators consistently show that affirmative action incentivizes about 0.8 additional years of education for the average minority group student and 1.2 more years of education for a student from a marginal minority subgroup.

The number of international undergraduate students at US public research universities increased dramatically over the past two decades, alongside concurrent reductions in state support for universities. We show that these trends are closely connected as public research universities relied on foreign students to cushion the effects of falling appropriations. The growing capacity in emerging economies to pay for a US education provided opportunities for universities to recover revenues from full-fare-paying foreign students. We estimate that between 1996 and 2012, a 10 percent reduction in state appropriations led to an increase in foreign enrollment of 16 percent at public research universities. (JEL H75, I22, I23)