Publications

Working Papers

 “What’s in the Name? Volunteer and Employment Opportunities in Egypt,” with Brian Feld and Abdelrahman Nagy

Conditionally accepted for Pre-Results Review in the Journal of Development Economics 

Female labor force participation in Egypt is among the lowest in the world, due, in part, to social norms that restrict what activities women can do outside of their homes. While in our study area only 17% believe that women should be allowed to work as an employee, 52% are supportive of women working as a volunteer even though volunteers receive financial compensation. In this project, we will visit 7,500 households and encourage women to apply for work opportunities that are either referred to as “employment” or as “volunteering” but otherwise have the same job characteristics, including compensation, hours and contract. In addition to randomizing the name of the work opportunity across 500 geographically distant agglomerations, we will randomize at the household level whether we target women only or whether we also involve other household members in order to better understand household decision making and how to alleviate constraints to women’s work out of the home. After comparing application behavior across these four treatment arms, we will randomize work opportunities among applicants. This will allow us to estimate the impact of working on the female applicants and their families, and compare work performance and satisfaction across treatment arms.

“Effects of Emigration on Labor Markets in Migrant Origin Areas: Evidence from Internal Migration in Indonesia,” with David Buller. 

Revision requested by the Journal of Development Economics 

We study the effects of internal migration in Indonesia on labor market outcomes in migrant origin areas. In order to address endogeneity of the decision to migrate, we instrument emigration rates with labor demand shocks in destination areas interacted with historical migration patterns. Using detailed longitudinal data from over 39,000 individuals, whom we observe over a 25-year time period, we find that a one percentage point increase in the emigration rate leads to a 3.65 percent decline in hourly income of those who stay in origin areas. Negative income effects are concentrated in the formal sector and are most pronounced for low-skilled workers who may have worked as complements to the high-skilled migrants who left. As emigrants were concentrated in the formal sector prior to departure, we see a slight increase in formal employment, especially among high-skilled workers, who may have been most substitutable to emigrants.

“Selection and Heterogeneity in the Returns to Migration,” with Eduardo Cenci and Emilia Tjernstrom

We aim to reconcile divergent estimates of the returns to rural-urban migration in developing countries by explicitly accounting for heterogeneity and self-selection. We use longitudinal data from four countries—Indonesia, South Africa, China, and Tanzania—where we observe the location choices and labor outcomes of tens of thousands of adults over multiple periods. We model self-selection into migration in a multi-period Roy model that incorporates worker heterogeneity in both absolute and comparative advantage and estimate a correlated random coefficient model that considers both types of heterogeneity. This model lets us extrapolate the returns identified from switcher sub-populations to non-switchers—a group of particular interest to policymakers deciding whether to encourage migration as a development strategy. Our results show considerable heterogeneity in the returns to migration and a clear relationship between absolute and comparative advantage across countries: those with the lowest productivity in rural areas stand most to gain from migrating. This suggests that migration is a pro-poor strategy but that barriers to migration may prevent workers from realizing their potential. Individuals appear to be inefficiently sorted across space; therefore, encouraging migration could lead to large returns.

“Migration Choice under Risk and Liquidity Constraints”

There are many reasons why people migrate, and different motivations may lead to different types of migration.  I study the choice to migrate within a developing country, where people may face substantial risk and liquidity constraints.  On the one hand, migration can be used as an ex-post risk-coping strategy after sudden negative income shocks.  On the other hand, migration can be seen an as investment, but liquidity constraints may prevent households from paying up-front migration costs, in which case positive income shocks may increase migration.  I model these diverging migratory responses to shocks in a dynamic migration choice model that I test using a 28-year panel of internal migration decisions by more than 45,000 individuals in Indonesia.  I document evidence that migration increases after contemporaneous negative income shocks as well as after an accumulation of preceding positive shocks.  Consistent with the model, migration after negative shocks is more often characterized by temporary moves to nearby, rural destinations, while migration as an investment strategy is more likely to involve urban destinations and take place over longer durations and distances.

 “The Effects of Internal Migration on Crime and Violence: Evidence from Indonesia,” with Brian Feld

We estimate the causal effect of internal migration on crime in Indonesia by combining detailed migration data with reports of crime and violence from over 2 million local newspaper articles, and from individual victimization reports from nationally representative surveys. To address endogeneity in the choice to migrate, we instrument the share of migrants in a destination with rainfall shocks at the migrant origin locations. We find that a 1 percent increase in the proportion of migrants in the population leads to a 3.9 percent increase in the number of economically-motivated crimes reported by local media. This is consistent with the existing literature on the effect of international migration to developed countries, but larger in magnitude. However, when using data on individual victimization from household surveys, we instead find that an increase in the share of migrants leads to a reduction in the probability that a person is a crime victim at the destination. The reduction in crime victimhood is particularly large for migrants and for women. We explore various reasons for these competing results, including reporting bias in newspapers as a source of increased crime coverage in areas with an influx of migrants, even though the number of crime victims decreases.

“Kin Transfers as Safety Nets in Response to Idiosyncratic and Correlated Shocks,” with Sylvan Herskowitz and Cristhian Pulido

Featured on CGIAR blog, IFPRI working paper (2021)

While formal insurance is widespread in much of the developed world, households in lower-income countries continue to rely heavily on informal risk-sharing networks when faced with unexpected shocks. Kin networks of non-coresident family members may play an important role by providing each other with informal social protection, sharing resources in response to correlated production shocks (rainfall) or idiosyncratic household shocks (sickness and death). Using detailed panel data from Indonesia, we examine how inter-household transfers within a household's kin network respond to different types of shocks and whether they are able to reduce household vulnerability. We find that households are exposed to meaningful risk from variations in local rainfall in the form of both income and household consumption. Rainfall substantially increases both transfers sent and received by households, suggesting that household and local supply effects dominate demand effects resulting from rainfall fluctuation. Finally, we find modest evidence that transfers reduce vulnerability of consumption to rainfall fluctuations by up to 11\%, but do not find strong evidence on the efficacy of formal social protection programs.

Work in Progress

“The Effect of Mexican Migrants on U.S. Labor Markets: A New Approach Using Weather Shocks and Migrant Networks,” with Maria Esther Caballero, Brian Cadena, and Brian Kovak

“Scoring Points: How Soccer Performance Shapes Attitudes towards Migrants,” with Brian Feld

Reports and Policy Papers

“Understanding Attitudes Towards Migrants: A Broader Perspective,” with Jeni Klugman, Human Development Research Paper Series, No 53, 2009

“Human Development Report 2009: Overcoming barriers: Human mobility and development,” contributor, United Nations Development Program, 2009