Work in progress
From Russia with Love: War-related emigration from Russia and its impact on receiving countries (with V. Kozlov and V. Yumaguzin)
The expansion of political repressions and censorship, military mobilization, and deteriorating economic conditions provoked the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians from their motherland after 02/2022. Some experts claim that this is the largest wave of emigration and brain drain from Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, while the amount of that emigration is, definitely, large and should have serious implications for Russia’s economic and political development and also for the development of receiving countries, the exact number of movers and their distribution across destination countries are not known. In this project, we aim to fill in this gap and provide both descriptive and quantitative evidence on emigration from Russia after 02/2022. We are conducting a meta-analysis of various pieces of information including official migration statistics of Russia and receiving countries, a few existing surveys of emigrants, and also provide analytical evidence using Big Data. Another goal is to estimate the impact of this emigration on labour and housing markets of hosting countries by using various econometric techniques.
The impact of Ukrainian refugees on the Russian labour market (with E. Chernina)
In this project, we examine in detail an episode of mass forced migration that has not been studied in the literature so far: the inflow of Ukrainian refugees to Russia in 2014. More than 1 mln. Ukrainian citizens entered Russia just in a few months of 2014. We use this shock and the resulting uneven distribution of refugees from Ukraine across Russian regions to estimate the causal impact of immigration on the employment of the native population in Russia. Our first preliminary findings suggest that immigration had a negative impact on the employment of Russians right after the mass arrival of refugees. We find negative effects on the overall employment rate and employment rates among certain socio-demographic groups of natives. However, while these effects are statistically significant and robust to different checks and don't show up in placebo tests, they are all economically unimportant and seem to be short-living.