[malshe]

I am guessing you have detailed data as you took 3 months to put it together. I suggest regressing wages on various employer-, employee-, and job-specific characteristics. That analysis will be more insightful. Also, comparing this wage delta across employers who are subject to the H1B cap and those who are cap exempt (e.g., non-profit universities) would make your story more compelling. Your analysis suggests that the wage delta would be small or 0 for cap exempt employers. Btw, you could consider this as a characteristic of employers and include it as a binary (1/0) variable in the regression model. Just my 2 cents.

[codebyaditya]

This is excellent feedback. You are absolutely right that a multivariate regression controlling for location, experience, and job family is the rigorous way to isolate the staffing firm coefficient from the raw data. We stuck to descriptive statistics (medians/distributions) for this initial post to keep it accessible to a general audience, but the 'Cap Exempt' comparison you suggested is a brilliant idea for a validity test. I’ll definitely look into and will try to add a 'Cap Exempt' binary variable to our roadmap for Part 2. Thanks for the 2 cents, it’s worth a lot more than that!