Paolo Abarcar

About Me

Welcome and thanks for visiting my page. I am a research economist at the Global Division of Mathematica. My staff page describes of some of my current projects.

This page is dedicated to my other professional activities. I do research primarily in development and labor economics. My most recent projects involve explaining international migration (and in particular return migration) and its effect on migrants and their households. I have a Ph.D. in Economics and Public Policy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Publications

• Medical Worker Migration and Origin-Country Human Capital: Evidence from U.S. Visa Policy (with Caroline Theoharides) ( Review of Economics and Statistics, January 2024)

  • Write up at VoxDev here.

  • Guest blog post at the World Bank here.

  • Featured at Marginal Revolution here.

• The Return Motivations of Legal Permanent Migrants: Evidence from Exchange Rate Shocks and Immigrants in Australia (Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, December 2017) (previous version: here)

• Financial Education and Financial Access for Transnational Households: Field Experimental Evidence from the Philippines (with Dean Yang and Rashmi Barua) (Economic Development and Cultural Change, October 2020)

  • Link to IPA project website here.

Working Papers

• Do Employers Value Return Migrants? An Experiment on the Returns to Foreign Work Experience (latest version: November 2015)

  • Guest blog post at the World Bank here.

Work in Progress

• The Impact of Information Disclosures in the Remittance Market (with Emily Beam)

• Impacts of Scholarships for Vocational Training: Findings from a Randomized Control Trial in Namibia (with Evan Borkum and Arif Mamun)