Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>This paper studies how access to scarce skilled labor affects corporate financial policy. The analysis links H-1B Labor Condition Application disclosures to Compustat public firms from 2008 to 2025 through a manually verified crosswalk. New H-1B hiring is followed by higher market leverage. In firm and year fixed effects with lagged Compustat controls, a one standard deviation increase in lagged new H-1B hiring is associated with a 2.26 percentage point increase in market leverage. The relation is strongest among firms with high sales growth and research and development intensity. The paper constructs predicted access improvements by interacting baseline H-1B exposure with declines in national H-1B cap pressure. Predicted access improvements increase new H-1B hiring, and the reduced form shows that they raise market leverage by 0.423 percentage points. Timing tests show that lagged access improvements predict current hiring and leverage, while future access improvements do not. The results are stable after excluding large information technology service providers, excluding the top one percent of H-1B exposed firm year observations, and leaving out each estimating fiscal year in turn. The evidence connects skilled immigration access to corporate financial policy through market based capital structure. JEL Codes: G32, J61, J24, M51, M54.</p>