Research
Research
Democracy Vouchers in the Medium Term (with Alan Griffith)
When Are There Returns to Rural-Urban Migration? Reconciling Experimental & Observational Data
Experimental studies in the development literature consistently find positive causal returns to inducing rural-urban migration, but observational studies of self-selected migration find almost no average change in a worker's wage---how do we reconcile these conflicting findings? I revisit individual-level panel data in Kenya to document heterogeneity in the returns to self-selected rural-urban migration: returns are much larger for workers with persistent negative origin earnings premiums. I argue that the LATE identified in RCTs is properly upper-bounded by the observational returns for this class of workers. I then explore why returns are heterogeneous by origin premium. I find evidence that most of the heterogeneity is due to workers with high rural premiums losing their premium when they migrate to an urban labor market, so that rural-urban migration has equalizing effects on the wage-gap of rural-born workers.
Migration as a Source of Income Growth: Estimating Time Trends and Heterogeneity in the Returns to Internal Migration in the U.S.