Assistant professor at the Department of Economics at Bocconi University
Affiliate at BIDSA, CEPR (LE and PE), EUDN, IGIER, LEAP and VfS (Labor and Population Economics), Research fellow at CReAM and IZA.
Research interests: migration, labour economics, political economy, d
email: josephsimon.goerlach@unibocconi.it
You will find me at Bocconi University in Room 5-E1-12, Via Roentgen 1, 20136 Milano, Italy
Working Papers:
This paper studies preferences in matchings between elderly care recipients and private care workers using unique company data on employing households' and workers' ex-ante preferences, matches, wages and durations. Estimating a matching model identifies valuations for different match attributes from both employer and worker perspectives, and quantifies effects of violating agents' preferences on payoffs and separations. Merging with longitudinal register data suggests elderly population shares increase most strongly among municipalities and demographics prone to prefer European care workers. Workers' sex, instead, may become less relevant. I predict growth and aggregate welfare in the sector depending on available worker types.
“Asymmetric Shocks and Heterogeneous Worker Mobility”, with Riccardo Franceschin (Volkswagen Foundation funded).
If workers are complementary in production, heterogeneity in their mobility reduces the shock absorption capacity of migration. We document that more educated workers are more mobile between European countries, and calibrate a dynamic equilibrium model in which workers differ in skill and migration preference. Migration on average offsets one fifth of the welfare loss following a negative shock in one country, with gains accruing largely to high-skilled workers. Low-skilled workers benefit marginally, and sometimes earn lower real wages than without migration. We examine other integration margins and find that the implemented ones (migration and monetary integration) primarily favor high-skilled workers.
Accounting for multiple responses to weather shocks drastically changes policy implications for climate-change adaptation. Kenyan households react to temperature shocks by sending migrants, by transiting to less climate-sensitive occupations, and by changing livestock species. Common interventions significantly affect these coping strategies. Randomised income transfers cushion consumption losses and decrease adaptation pressure, such as migration. Better infrastructure, instead, eases occupational transitions, reducing alternative adjustments, including migration and livestock composition. A model of joint migration, occupation, and livestock choices reveals important dynamics. Whilst transition to non-agricultural occupations initially serves as a substitute for migration, it acts as a steppingstone for later migration.
Despite recent advances, no general methods for computing bargaining power in non-cooperative games exist. We propose a number of axioms such a measure should satisfy and show that they characterise a unique function. The principle underlying this measure is that the influence of a player can be assessed according to how much changes in this player's preferences affect equilibrium outcomes. Considering specific classes of games, our approach nests existing measures of power. We present applications to cartel formation, the non-cooperative model of the household, and legislative bargaining.
“Skills and Substitutability: A New View on Immigrant Assimilation”, with Pietro Galeone (reject&resubmit at the Journal of Human Resources). [NEW DRAFT COMING SOON]
Immigrants' assimilation as they adapt to the host country is often measured by wage growth relative to native workers. This confounds two opposing forces: an adaptation of immigrants' skills that raises their productivity, and an increasing substitutability with earlier immigrants and natives, which puts downward pressure on wages. Based on a labor demand framework, we decompose wage growth into these components, and estimate the model's structural parameters using U.S. Census data. Since cohort sizes may be endogenous to wage growth through immigration and emigration choices, we instrument migrant numbers with variation in origin country earnings and relative purchasing power. Results show that both skill growth and substitutability progress as migrants assimilate to the host country, that skill growth strongly exceeds wage growth, and that a small positive short-run effect of immigration on the average wage of natives quickly dissipates as immigrants become more substitutable to natives.
Publications:
"Temporary Migration for Long-term Investment." Journal of Development Economics 174 (2025): pp 103360, with Laurent Bossavie, Çağlar Özden and He Wang.
“Terrorism and Education: Evidence from Instrumental-Variables Estimators.” Journal of Applied Econometrics 39.5 (2024): pp 906-925, with Marco Alfano.
“Capital Markets, Temporary Migration and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Bangladesh.” World Development 176 (2024): pp 106505, with Laurent Bossavie, Çağlar Özden and He Wang. Appendix
“The Selection of Return Migrants: Some Evidence and a Model-based Analysis.” In: Robert Sauer: World Scientific Encyclopedia of Global Migration (Volume 3, Chapter 4), World Scientific Publishers (2024), with Filippo Palomba.
“Terrorism, media coverage and education: Evidence from al-Shabaab attacks in Kenya.” Journal of the European Economic Association 21.2 (2023): pp 727-763, with Marco Alfano. Appendix
“Borrowing Constraints and the Dynamics of Return and Repeat Migration.” Journal of Labor Economics 41.1 (2023): pp 205-243. Appendix
“The Dynamics of Return Migration, Human Capital Accumulation, and Wage Assimilation.” Review of Economic Studies 89.6 (2022): pp 2841–2871, with Jérôme Adda and Christian Dustmann. Appendix
“Temporary migration entails benefits, but also costs, for sending and receiving countries.” IZA World of Labor 2022: 503, with Katarina Kuske.
“Spillovers and Strategic Interaction in Immigration Policies.” Journal of Economic Geography 21.2 (2021): pp 287-315, with Nicolas Motz.
“Estimating Immigrant Earnings Profiles when Migrations Are Temporary.” Labour Economics 41 (2016): pp 1-8, with Christian Dustmann.
“The Economics of Temporary Migrations.” Journal of Economic Literature 54.1 (2016): pp 98-136, with Christian Dustmann.
“Selective Out-Migration and the Estimation of Immigrants’ Earnings Profiles.” In: Barry R. Chiswick and Paul W. Miller (editors), Handbook of the Economics of International Migration 1A, North Holland (2015): pp 489-533, with Christian Dustmann.
“Western Representations of Fascist Influences on Islamist Thought.” In: Jörg Feuchter, Friedhelm Hoffmann and Bee Yun (editors), Cultural Transfers in Dispute - Representations in Asia, Europe and the Arab World, Campus (2011): pp 149-166.
Work in Progress:
“Spatial Political Sorting on the Neighborhood Level”, with Felix Iglhaut.
“Bargaining Power in EU Law-Making”, with Nicolas Motz.
"FDI and Remittances", with Katarina Kuske.
"Remote Work and Location Choice", with Cevat Aksoy, Mathias Dolls and Çağlar Özden.
Policy reports and non-academic articles:
From migrant worker to owner: When temporary migration is used to start one's own business - VoxEU (08/03/2024), with Laurent Bossavie, Çağlar Özden and He Wang. Re-published on editor's initiative on VoxDev (09/04/2024.
Predicting terror attacks using insurgent networks and revenue streams - VoxDev (20/02/2024).
Migration as a Step Towards Opening a Business - #LEAPTalks/Bocconi Knowledge (30/06/2023). Italian version.
Immigrants need certainties - Interview for Via Sarfatti 25 (28/04/2023).
Al-Shabaab: sensational media reports about Kenyan terror attacks keep kids out of school - The Conversation (24/11/2022), with Marco Alfano.
Access to media amplifies negative effects of terrorism on school enrolment in Kenya - EurekAlert! (02/11/2022), with Marco Alfano.
How certainty helps immigrants integrate and contribute more to the local economy - The Conversation (20/06/2022). Translated to Portuguese for Interesse Nacional.
Media coverage of terrorism / La cobertura mediática del terrorismo / Couverture médiatique du terrorisme - globaldev.blog (16/11/2020), with Marco Alfano.
Immigration: time to shift the debate - viaSarfatti25 Videos (15/03/2018).
Alla buona integrazione servono tempi certi - viaSarfatti25 Numero 5 - anno XII (Maggio 2017), p 33.
What do we know about migration? Informing the debate Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration: Policy briefing (2014), with Marco Alfano, Michele Battisti, Charles Clarke, Thomas Cornelissen, Christian Dustmann, Francesco Fasani, Tommaso Frattini, Luigi Minale, Anna Okatenko, Ian Preston and Jonathan Wadsworth.
Teaching
I currently teach courses in Structural Econometrics (PhD) and Microeconomics (BSc).
In the past, I also taught a PhD course on Dynamic Panel Data Analysis (slides) and undergraduate courses in Econometrics.
For MSc students, at some point I prepared this mini-illustration of structural estimation (Matlab).