Work in progress
"Labour market expectations and job search behaviour of young workers in Cote d'Ivoire", with Esther Mirjam Girsberger and Richard Moussa. - Currently in field.
Labour markets in Sub-Saharan Africa are characterised by graduate unemployment and an “aspiration-job gap”. Young graduates search for formal (salaried) jobs, but there are only few job opportunities in the formal sector. Labour market expectations and the ability to sustain a prolonged job search are key drivers of graduates’ search behaviour. We collect novel longitudinal data on young graduates in Abidjan, the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire, to study graduates’ labour market expectations, job search behaviour and labour market outcomes. We then develop and estimate a job search model where job seekers with heterogenous beliefs over sector-specific labour market opportunities allocate their time across job search in different sectors and other activities. Finally, we will use our model to estimate the value of providing accurate labour market information and assess how different labour market policies affect graduates’ search behaviour and their job prospects.
"Perceived Returns, Mistakes and the Value of Information"
Uncertainty of outcomes is a common feature of many economic decisions. For example, a job seeker and an employer must decide whether to match or not with some uncertainty about the match quality; this implies that some agents will make mistakes, i.e. make a different choice than the one they would have made if they had full information. In this framework, what would be the aggregate value of a signal on the latent quality, e.g. a certification of the worker or the firm? This research proposes a simple stated choice design to (1) understand the cost of uncertainty and (2) the value of information (e.g., certification) in reducing the risk premium, and mitigating mistakes. The framework is flexible enough to accommodate different models of choice under uncertainty, and allows differentiating between the resolvable and unresolvable uncertainty.
Working Papers
"Combining stated and revealed preferences", with Marc Henry and Ismael Mourifié - Current Version.
Can stated preferences inform counterfactual analyses of actual choice? This research proposes a novel approach to researchers who have access to both stated choices in hypothetical scenarios and actual choices, matched or unmatched. The key idea is to use stated choices to identify the distribution of individual unobserved heterogeneity. If this unobserved heterogeneity is the source of endogeneity, the researcher can correct for its influence in a demand function estimation using actual choices and recover causal effects. Bounds on causal effects are derived in the case where stated choices and actual choices are observed in unmatched data sets. These data combination bounds are of independent interest.
"Can people think exogenously? A test of the ceteris paribus assumption in stated preference experiments." with Bintou Ball (Revise and Resubmit, OxBES)
Peer-Reviewed Papers
“The Puzzle of Educated Unemployment in West Africa," with Esther Mirjam Girsberger - Current version - VoxDev - (Conditionally Accepted, Journal of the European Economic Association)
"Is the distribution of resolvable uncertainty Type I extreme value? A Test for Random Coefficient Models using Choice Probabilities" (Accepted, Economics Letters)- here
"Just Ask Them Twice: Choice Probabilities and Identification of Ex ante returns and Willingness-To-Pay,"- (forthcoming, Economic Journal), with Esther Mirjam Girsberger - previously “Identification of Ex ante Returns Using Elicited Choice Probabilities” - STEG Policy Brief
"What Drives Overstay? The Case of Afghan Asylum Seekers in Germany" (forthcoming, Journal of the European Economic Association) , with Francois Poinas, was previously “The (Option-)value of Overstaying" - presentation BSE Forum Migration 2022
“Role models and revealed gender-specific costs of STEM in an extended Roy model of major choice”, with Marc Henry and Ismael Mourifié - Journal of Econometrics, 238, (2024): 105571.
“Sharp bounds and Testability of a Roy model of STEM Major Choices,” with Ismael Mourifié and Marc Henry, (pdf) - Journal of Political Economy, 128.8 (2020): 3220-3283, (2020).
“Regional Migration and Wage Inequality in the West African Economic and Migration Union,” with Esther Mirjam Girsberger and Hillel Rapoport - Journal of Comparative Economics, 48.2 (2020), 385-404.
“Electoral Cycles, Partisan Effects and US Naturalization policies,” with Marcus Drometer, Public Choice 183.1 (2020): 43-68.
“Combinatorial bootstrap inference in partially identified incomplete structural models,” with Marc Henry and Maurice Queyranne (pdf) - Quantitative Economics, 6, (2015): 499-529.
“Note on the identification in two probit model with dummy endogenous regressor,” with Ismael Mourifié (pdf) - Economics Letters 125.3 (2014): 360-363.
Other Papers
“Language Proficiency and Economic Incentives: The Case of Syrian Asylum Seekers in Germany”, with May Khourshed – MEA Working Paper 01-2020
“What Makes Brain Drain More Likely? Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa”, (pdf) - CESifo Working Paper No. 6209.
“Qualifications, potentials and life courses of Syrian asylum seekers in Bavaria,” with Christian Hunkler, May Khourshed and Axel Börsch-Supan - MEA Working Paper 01-2019.
“From Asylum Seekers to Illegal Migrants: The Intention to Overstay of Afghan Asylum Seekers in Germany,” with May Khourshed and Diana López-Falcón - MEA Working Paper 01-2020.