Research Abstracts

Published Papers

Medical Worker Migration and Origin-Country Human Capital: Evidence from U.S. Visa Policy (with Caroline Theoharides)

We exploit changes in U.S. visa policies for nurses to measure the origin-country human capital response to international migration opportunities. Combining data on all migrant departures and postsecondary institutions in the Philippines, we show that nursing enrollment and graduation increased substantially in response to greater U.S. demand for nurses. The supply of nursing programs expanded. Nurse quality, measured by licensure exam pass rates, declined. Despite this, for each nurse migrant, 9 additional nurses were licensed. New nurses switched from other degree types, but graduated at higher rates than they would have otherwise, increasing the human capital stock in the Philippines.

Financial Education and Financial Access for Transnational Households: Field Experimental Evidence from the Philippines (with Dean Yang and Rashmi Barua)

We implemented a randomized controlled trial among transnational households in the Philippines estimating impacts on financial behaviors of a financial education treatment, a financial access treatment, and the combination of the two. We test whether there are complementarities between financial education and financial access interventions, and also provide insight into the nature of constraints operating in financial services markets. We find no evidence of complementarities between the financial education and financial access treatments. In addition, while we find no evidence of constraints in access to formal credit and savings products, our results do suggest that access constraints exist in the formal insurance market. Impacts on other financial behaviors are suggestive of the importance of information constraints in financial decision-making. These results provide guidance to designers of financial interventions in similar populations.

The Return Motivations of Legal Permanent Migrants: Evidence from Exchange Rate Shocks and Immigrants in Australia

Why do legal permanent migrants return to their home countries? How do home country conditions influence such a decision? This paper uses exogenous exchange rate shocks arising from the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis to distinguish between the motivations of Australian immigrants to return to their home country. A 10 percent favorable shock (a depreciation in a migrant’s home country currency) leads to an almost 10 percent reduced likelihood of return in a two year period. The effect is stronger for those with pre-existing intentions to return, weaker for those undecided, and zero for those who initially desired to stay. These results favor a life-cycle explanation for migrant behavior and reject the theory that migrants are target earners who seek to invest upon return home.

Working Papers

Do Employers Value Return Migrants? An Experiment on the Returns to Foreign Work Experience

Return migration is a potentially important channel through which migrant-sending countries stand to benefit from international migration. Yet to date, its consequences for return migrants and domestic labor markets remain poorly understood. What is the value of return migrants, and the foreign work experience they bring, to domestic employers? I conduct an audit study in the Philippines, sending over 8,000 fictitious resumes in response to online job postings across multiple occupations. Resumes are randomly assigned varying lengths of foreign work experience, among other things. Employers appear to disfavor return migrants: workers with foreign work experience receive 12 percent fewer callbacks than non-migrants, with callback rates even lower for those who have spent a longer time abroad. I test possible explanations and find that, consistent with employer interviews, location-specific human capital appears to be important to employers, and that this human capital deteriorates as a worker spends time away from the domestic economy.