A recent paper with Michael Lokshin, “A Market for Work Permits” (with many updates to the earlier draft) proposed the creation of a market for work permits. This would allow citizens to rent out their right-to-work (RTW) for a period of their choice. On the other side of the market, foreigners can purchase time-bound work permits (WPs). This would help tap into the (potentially huge) unexploited gains from restrictions on international migration. Yet host countries would retain control over the flow of migrants and total employment. There are many gains to the host country, as discussed in the paper.
There is one aspect of the policy proposal that is worth considering. Under certain conditions, this policy will create a new binding floor to labor earnings in the host country—a new lower bound, above the current floor. The only estimate of the level of the income floor in America (averaged over reported incomes of the poor, with higher weight on poorer people) puts the floor at about $5 per person per day (Jolliffe et al., 2019). Allowing for (say) one dependent, this implies an income of $10 a day. It would be reasonable to assume that this is lower than the equilibrium price of a WP in our proposal. Indeed, $10 a day is lower than the minimum wage rate in the US for an eight hour day.
Workers in the host country will sell their RTW if they earn less than the going price in this new market (and some earning more than it will also do so if they experience a disutility of work). Similarly, foreign workers will only take up migration under this scheme if they earn something more than the going price of WPs (sufficiently higher to cover costs of moving and any tax levied). This holds for all contracted time periods of the WPs. Thus, creating a market in WPs along the lines Lokshin and I suggest can be thought of as a new way of providing a guaranteed minimum income for each time period. And it is self-financing.
To better understand this argument, we can posit a first-best distribution in the host country that maximizes some weighted aggregate of utilities, with the weights reflecting the government’s social preferences. The first-best distribution of income is bounded below by some value, lets call it ymin. However, in the absence of this policy, the first-best is not implementable given other constraints (notably on information and administrative capabilities). Thus, the observed distribution has incomes below ymin due to uninsured shocks or longer-term disadvantage. With the policy in place, the host government can now solve for the tax rate on WPs required to assure ymin (as explained in the new version of the paper). Thus, the market for WPs now makes it feasible to implement the host country’s socially optimal minimum income.
There is another control available to the host country, namely its power over eligibility to purchase WPs, or sell the RTW. For example, the US might (initially at least) choose to make the market only available to citizens of (say) Mexico. Restricting migrant eligibility, or expanding eligibility to sell the RTW among citizens of the host country, will reduce the equilibrium price.
The big difference between these two policy instruments—the tax on WPs and eligibility conditions—is that the tax instrument can raise revenue, albeit at the expense of both citizens selling their RTW and foreigners buying WPs. It is reasonable to assume that the (positive) partial equilibrium effect of a higher tax rate on revenue dominates the (negative) effect stemming from the deterrent effect of a higher tax on migration. Then the host government faces a trade-off between the level of the income floor and the extra revenue generated by a higher tax on WPs.
Under certain conditions (explained in the paper) one can solve for the host government’s optimal tax on the new WPs, obtained by balancing its desire for revenue against its desire to implement its first-best level of the floor to living standards.
Jolliffe, Dean, Juan Margitic, and Martin Ravallion, 2019, “Food Stamps and America’s Poorest,” NBER WP 26025.