Using the staggered adoption of U.S. state-level pay transparency laws that improve pay transparency, we find that the probability of high-wage workers becoming entrepreneurs significantly increases following the adoption of such laws. Moreover, the salaries of high-wage workers significantly increase following the laws’ passage. These findings are consistent with theory suggesting that improved pay transparency increases the relative return of entrepreneurship for high-wage workers.

Foreign workers have been an important part of the labor force in public accounting firms over the past two decades. In this paper, we investigate whether and why foreign workers influence audit quality. We find that audit offices with more newly hired foreign labor have a lower mean absolute value of discretionary accruals and a smaller rate of restatements for their clients. The effect is more pronounced for audit offices that face more resource constraints or require greater foreign expertise. The results of improved audit quality are robust to alternative measures of immigrant intensity and audit quality, alternative samples, and using different ways to address endogeneity concerns. Overall, our paper contributes to the literature by showing the impact of foreign labor in the auditing profession and provides public policy implications for the recent H‐1B visa debate.