主题：When talent cannot cross borders: Do immigration restrictions constrain or incentivize firms to build up AI capabilities?
时间: 2026年9月17日 10:00-11:30
地点: 管理学院 A823
主讲人: 程思，哥本哈根商学院助理教授
主持人: 吴志岩，浙江大学管理学院教授
Bio:
Si (Coco) Cheng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School. She received her PhD in Management at ESSEC Business School. Her research interests include non-market strategy, corporate political activities, and global institutions.
Abstract:
Restrictions on skilled immigration are commonly viewed as a constraint on firm innovation and technology development because they limit access to specialized human capital. Yet, this logic cannot be readily extended to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in firms because it can reduce the need for skilled employees through automation and augmentation. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in firms’access to foreign skilled labor, including the post-2016 tightening of H-1B adjudication and random outcomes from the H-1B lottery, we examine whether restrictive immigration policies constrain or instead incentivize the development of AI capacities in firms. We use firm-year measures of AI skill capacity derived from employee resumes and combine those with financial and patent data for 7,770 firm-year observations from 1,009 publicly listed US firms between 2012 and 2021. We find that greater exposure to immigration restrictions leads firms to expand their AI capacity in subsequent years. These effects are concentrated outside of the IT sector and among firms with limited prior AI patenting, are not accompanied by increases in AI patent applications, and coincide with higher productivity. Our findings show that restrictive immigration policies create triggers for firms’AI decisions. This insight advances theory on the effects of immigration restrictions and makes it actionable in an era in which AI provides new opportunities for firms.
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