Broadly speaking, my research interests are in the areas of labor and development economics. My dissertation work focuses on a topic of great personal importance to me: The economic assimilation of refugees. Working with refugee populations, I have always been curious about the trajectory of refugee economic assimilation in the U.S., especially compared to those who immigrate for economic reasons. Another line of research I am currently working on is concerned with the relative economic outcomes ( i.e., employment, homeownership) of minorities and immigrants across the business cycle.
Publications
Abstract: It has been documented that refugees have lower earnings than non-refugees with comparable human capital. It is possible that the differences in the correlation between schooling and unobservable factors across the two groups contribute to this gap. This paper examines the return to schooling for refugee and non-refugee men in the United States. The results show that non-refugees receive a higher return to schooling upon arrival. Moreover, the return to schooling for refugees grows modestly over time, thereby failing to catch up with that of non-refugees after two decades in the country, even in specifications that conduct sensitivity analysis. This suggests that differences in adaptability traits are more important than better occupational matches in both the initial gap in the return to schooling and its evolution.
Educational Attainment of Children of Refugee and Economic Immigrants in the U.S. (Migration Letters)
Abstract: This paper analyzes the educational attainment of second-generation economic and refugee immigrants. Data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) survey are used to estimate two measures of educational outcomes: securing a college degree, and years of schooling completed. Results show that, on average, children of refugees have educational attainment outcomes that are on par with those of children of economic immigrants. They have similar odds of college degree achievement and are also as likely to acquire similar years of schooling as children of economic immigrants. Controlling for relevant variables such as gender, marital status, presence of children, citizenship status, race and parents’ country of origin do not affect these estimates.
Relative Wages of Immigrants and the Great Recession -With Fahad Gill (Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy)
Abstract: Using CPS data from 2007–2012, we examine how the Great Recession affects relative wages of immigrant men in the short run. Compared to the pre-recession period, immigrants see a modest decline in their relative wages during the recession regardless of model specification. After the recession, immigrants largely rebound from the decline, but the wage disadvantage does not completely revert to its pre-recession level.
Selective in- and out-migration by immigrants, or selection of natives into employment do not seem to drive the results. It appears that, during the recession, immigrants may have traded higher employment with lower wages and employers might have been willing to hire them as a cost-saving measure. The results could have implications for how relative wages of immigrants respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic Recession.
Dynamics of the Raw English Fluency Premium for Refugees and Other Immigrants in the U.S. (Journal of Refugee and Immigrant Studies)
Abstract: Previous work has established that U.S. immigrants earn more if they are fluent in English, but a portion of that return likely reflects biases because fluency is correlated with unobserved factors like self-selection and ability to job-shop. This paper investigates those factors by looking at the variation in the crude fluency returns earned by resettled refugees and other immigrants in the U.S. Results show that non-refugees initially earn a much larger wage return for fluency, and this gap persists in the first years after immigration. However, refugees’ return does grow afterward and catches up with that of the non-refugees.
The Unexpectedly Small Wage Return for English Fluency among Recent U.S. Refugees (Journal of Applied Business and Economics)
Abstract: Previous studies have estimated that English fluency raises US immigrants’ wages around 17-33 percent. This paper re-estimates that return for a sample of recent refugees, a group that has not had time to improve its fluency after arrival and is less likely to have been strongly selected on ability into the labor force. The new estimates indicate that these workers receive a much smaller return to English, suggesting that the returns to fluency estimated previously did not reflect the language requirements of workers’ jobs, but rather reflected unobserved skills, job-skill matching, or else arose through post-migration mechanisms like job-shopping or networking.
The Racial Homeownership Gap and the Covid-19 Pandemic Recession
Abstract: Homeownership is the primary mechanism for achieving wealth and sustaining intergenerational wealth transfers. However, the benefits of homeownership have not been equitably distributed across black and white homeowners. Structural barriers, rooted in historical racial discrimination, and their enduring legacies have created a large persistent disparity in homeownership rates between Black households and white households. This persistent gap fluctuates in response to the business cycle. This work uses the 2019-2022 American Community Survey (ACS) microdata to investigate how the COVID-19 recession affected the racial homeownership gap.
The preliminary results show that there is a large racial gap in homeownership between black and white households in the pre-recession period of 2019. Contrary to expectations, the black-white homeownership gap did not widen in the aftermath of the COVID-19 recession. Instead, there was a slight decrease in the gap, with the raw gap decreasing by approximately 0.7 percentage points. However, this slight decrease in the raw gap disappears for the entire sample when the controls are introduced to the baseline regression model that produces the raw gap, except for college-educated black households in their home-buying prime ages. For this specific demographic, the adjusted gap decreased by approximately 1.2 percentage points, surpassing the reduction observed in the raw gap. The stability of the gap during the COVID-19 pandemic is probably because, unlike past recessions, the COVID-19 recession did not originate from the housing market, and home prices were stable or even increased. Furthermore, swift government interventions, including foreclosure moratoriums and financial assistance programs, provided critical support to existing homeowners, mitigating the adverse impacts of the pandemic-induced economic shocks. The government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to examine the effectiveness of policy interventions in ameliorating the negative effects of economic downturns on homeownership disparities.
Abstract: This paper uses the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) to investigate the impact of the pandemic recession on the employment patterns of older immigrant men relative to their native-born counterparts. The results show that older immigrant men’s pre-pandemic employment advantage disappears during the pandemic recession. However, it bounces back close to its pre-recession level during the recovery period. The observed disparities in employment opportunities between the two groups are mainly driven by the workers in the low-remotability occupations category. Differences in the labor supply response between the two groups do not seem to drive the results. Given the current low birth rate and the aging population, these findings have important implications for the role of immigrants in the labor market in the short- and long-run.
Abstract: This work investigates the homeownership attainment of refugees and how it compares to that of other immigrants during their first decade in the country and beyond. Refugees, a distinct immigrant group, may have different homeownership outcomes than other immigrants. Results show that refugees are about 6 percent less likely to own their homes than non-refugees during the first decade after arrival. The gap widens to about 13 percent when the immigrants from the Eastern Europe region are excluded from the analysis. However, in the long run, refugees and non-refugees have a similar likelihood in homeownership attainment. The findings have important implications for the effectiveness of refugee integration policies in host countries.
Abstract: This paper uses the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) to study how the pandemic recession affected the unemployment patterns of older black men relative to their white counterparts. Older black workers’ labor market outcomes are likely to be more adversely affected by the pandemic recession than their white counterparts due to their disproportionate concentration in low-skilled occupations and racial discrimination. Preliminary results show that older black men’s pre-pandemic unemployment gap quadrupled during the pandemic recession and the early recovery period. The unemployment gap drops significantly in the first half of 2021 and returns to its pre-pandemic level during the second half of 2021 (when the sample period ends). The differences in unemployment gap between the two groups are mainly driven by the differences found in the subsample of college-educated men except at the height of the recession period. Remotability of occupations does factor into the unemployment gap dynamics between the two groups but it plays a significant role in labor force participation differences between the two groups.
The Ethnic Homeownership Gap and the COVID-19 Pandemic Recession
Abstract: This work uses data from the 2019-2022 American Community Survey (ACS) to investigate how the COVID-19 recession and its aftermath have affected the homeownership disparity between Hispanic and White households.
The preliminary findings of this study, however, reveal a different outcome. The Hispanic-white homeownership gap did not widen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, the gap narrowed slightly, with the unadjusted homeownership differential decreasing by approximately two percentage points. After controlling for socioeconomic factors such as income, education, and employment status, the gap reduction remained, though more modest, at about half a percentage point. This trend is particularly notable among prime-aged households, where the gap reduction was more pronounced, suggesting that certain structural factors may have been mitigated during this period.
Evolution of Schooling Returns of Refugees and Other Immigrants in the U.S.: Are Women Different?
Abstract: Human capital is an important mechanism that influences both the migration decisions of immigrants and the rate at which they integrate in the host country. However, returns to human capital could be correlated with difficult-to-observe factors such as self-selection, and legal rights, and these unobservables can affect the economic assimilation of immigrants into the host country differently. The objective of this paper is to investigate the returns to human capital skills for refugees and other immigrant women during the first two decades after they come to the U.S. Refugees are a subset of immigrants who have different characteristics and also face different constraints than other immigrants. In investigating the differential returns to human capital skills for refugee and other immigrant men, Shaeye (2016, 2017) finds that non-refugee immigrant men receive higher returns to both fluency and schooling than refugee men do at arrival and over time. We expect that a similar pattern would emerge for non-refugee women as well, either directly through primary female movers or indirectly through the positive assortative mating of tied movers. Preliminary results show that non-refugee women initially earn larger returns to human capital skills. Although refugees’ returns grow over time, the gap doesn’t close even after two decades in the U.S.
Works in progress
"Asian “Chilling Effect” During the Pandemic: What Can We Learn from Reported Health Status?" (With Ruth Oyelere, Agness College)
Homeownership Trends of Low-Income Households and the COVID-19 Pandemic Recession
Does Immigration Help or Hurt? The Role of Immigrant Workers in the U.S. Trucking Industry.?" (With Omid Bagheri, Kent State)