Research

Works in Progress

Higher Gains for Lower Earners: Place Effects, Match Effects, and Dynamic Selection in Rural-Urban Migration

Across experimental and observational studies in the development literature, estimates of the returns to rural-urban migration vary widely, from 0% to more than 30%. I revisit individual-level panel data in Kenya to study how heterogeneity in returns by baseline earnings can clarify conflicting estimates across studies. I then propose a simple earnings decomposition to understand why returns are heterogeneous by baseline earnings. I empirically separate the role of heterogeneous place effects versus heterogeneous worker-location match effects. I find that high rural earners are more likely to use urban migration to insure against negative origin shocks (i.e., leverage temporarily large place effects to smooth income), but sacrifice a high rural earnings premium when they migrate (i.e., negative match effects) so that the nominal return is near zero. Low earners use urban migration as a "move to opportunity'" but have nominal gains only through place effects, not through positive match effects. Low earners select into migration less dynamically than high earners. Lastly, I apply the same decomposition to panel data in Indonesia to demonstrate how this framework generalizes to other settings.

Democracy Vouchers in the Medium Term (with Alan Griffith)

Is It Still Possible to Move to Opportunity? Evaluating Time Trends in the Returns to Internal US Migration