If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

Albert Einstein

Fields of Interest

Primary fields: Labor and Development Economics

Secondary fields: Applied Econometrics and Applied Microeconomics

Publications

Working papers

“Labor Supply of Married Women in Mexico: 1990 -2000” (with Raymundo M. Campos-Vázquez), COLMEX Working Paper

“Job Search, Social Interactions, and Labor Market Performance of Low-Skilled Immigrants", CIDE Working Paper

¿Quiénes son los NiNis en México? (with Raymundo M. Campos-Vázquez), COLMEX Working Paper

“Immigrants’ Location Choices: The Role of Networks’ Labor Market Outcomes” Coming soon!

Abstract: 

It is widely recognized that immigrants' networks play an important role on the immigrants' location decisions. A channel through which networks affect these location choices is the information that settled immigrants provide to newcomers about the job opportunities available in a particular local labor market. The literature so far has presented mixed evidence only on the effect that the overall labor market performance has on the location decisions. However, a central aspect of the networks' information sharing is that the network's realized labor market outcomes may be more salient in the location decisions of those using the network than the overall labor market opportunities. This paper presents a test of that hypothesis. We developed a job-search-based discrete choice model of the immigrants' location choices, which makes a distinction between high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants. Our hypothesis is that high-skilled immigrants search for jobs through formal channels, and low-skilled immigrants rely on their networks. We then estimate an aggregate model of the determinants of location choices of recent immigrants by skill level using data from the 2000 U.S. Census of Population and the American Community Surveys from 2005 to 2007. We find that high-skilled immigrants only respond to local labor market information, whereas low-skilled immigrants are also influenced by the realized labor market outcomes of their network.  Furthermore, we find that high-skilled females tend to go to places where they have good job prospects, whereas low-skilled females move to cities where their male compatriots have good economic opportunities.