JULIÁN COSTAS-FERNÁNDEZ

Working Papers:

Train to Opportunity: the Effect of Infrastructure on Intergenerational Mobility, with Jose-Alberto Guerra (Universidad de los Andes) and Myra Mohnen (University of Ottawa) - R&R EJ

Can transport infrastructure promote long-term labor opportunities and break the occupation tie between parents and their children? This paper estimates the causal effect of access to the railroad network on intergenerational mobility in nineteenth-century England and Wales. By linking individuals across the five full-population censuses from 1851 to 1911, and geolocating addresses, we determine how proximity to the nearest train station affected the occupation mobility between fathers and sons. We address the endogeneity in proximity to train stations by leveraging the as-good-as-random opening of built and planned train stations. We find that sons who grew up approximately 5 km closer to a train station were 2% more likely to work in a different occupation than their father and 6% more likely to be upwardly mobile. The majority of the effects are driven by changes in local labor opportunities.

Work In Progress:

Family Friendly Workplace Policies, with Sebastian Findeisen, Anna Raute, and Uta Schönberg - Slides

We introduce a monopsony model where firms choose wage-childcare bundles. We argue that, by speeding up the return to work after childbirth, childcare acts as a productive amenity. This creates a strong incentive for high productive firms, which face large productivity opportunity costs from parental non-employment, to introduce childcare. Drawing on unique German employer-employee data supplemented with detailed firm survey data, we first show that childcare providing establishments are more productive. In line with our model, establishments that introduce childcare indeed experience subsequent employment growth, both through attracting new hires and increasing retention. The retention channel is especially prominent for mothers with young children. The increased retention of mothers is long-lasting, particularly for high-wage mothers for whom we find sizeable positive effects on returning to the firm of around 20%. Childcare provision also prevents occupational downgrading after childbirth, further supporting the notion of firm provided childcare being a productive amenity.

Stayin’ Elite: Wealth, Multigenerational Persistence, and Political Power Among the US Hyperwealthy, 1875-1950, with Kirill Shakhnov (University of Surrey)

The Long-Run Persistence of Social Networks, with Naim Bro (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez), Miguel Angel Carpio (Universidad de Piura) and Juliana Jaramillo Echeverri (Central Bank of Colombia)

Publications:

Distributional Effects of Immigration and Imperfect Labour Markets, with Simon Lodato (Middlesex University London) - Economic Letters, 2024 (Replication)

In canonical models, the labour share is orthogonal to immigration shocks in the long run, regardless of the impact of immigration on productivity. In contrast, this paper provides evidence that immigration increases labour productivity while reducing the labour share. We produce this evidence using data from Great Britain with a shift-share instrument that exploits European Union expansions and changes in immigration to other high-income countries. Our results are consistent with the predictions from imperfect labour market models, where immigrant and native workers are heterogeneous in skills, and the former have lower labour supply elasticities than the latter. A significant implication of our analysis is that immigration redistributes income from workers to employers.

The Effect of Foreign Students on Native Students’ Outcomes in Higher Education, with Angus Holford (ISER, University of Essex) and Greta Morando (Social Research Institute, UCL) - European Economic Review, 2023

This paper offers new evidence of the role of immigration in shaping the educational and labour market outcomes of natives. We use administrative data on the entire English higher education system and exploit the idiosyncratic variation of foreign students within university-degree across four cohorts of undergraduate students. Foreign peers have zero to mild effects on natives' educational outcomes, such as graduation probability and degree classification. Large effects are found on displacement across universities and degree types after enrolment, although these outcomes are rare occurrences. In line with the mild effects on education outcomes, we also find little effect of foreign peers affecting early labour market outcomes of native graduates.

Poverty, Inequality and the Composition of Redistribution, with Simon Lodato (Middlesex University London) - Social Choice & Welfare, 2022

We study the use of social expenditures and regulation for redistribution. When regulated goods are essential in the consumption bundle of the poor, a high poverty rate creates incentives to increase redistribution through regulation. By contrast, inequality directs redistribution towards social expenditures. We propose a theoretical model that captures the trade-off between these two redistributive policies and test the model implications with a novel municipality dataset on income and local government policies. Theory predicts and empirical evidence supports that failing to account for poverty biases the effect of inequality on redistribution. Our evidence also reflects the positive connection between poverty and the use of regulation for redistribution.

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