RESEARCH

WORK-IN-PROGRESS (NEAR COMPLETION):

• "Agentic inequalities"

with Omer Bilgin (LSE), Iason Gabriel (DeepMind) and Lewis Hammond (Cooperative AI Foundation)

• "Financing the AI triad: A framework for building capacity globally" 

with Sumaya Nur Adan (Oxford), Luise Eder (Oxford), Daniela Muhaj (Georgetown), Robert Trager (Oxford) & Lucia Velasco (UN)

• "How can frontier AI firms support informed labour market policy" 

with Sam Manning (GovAI) &  Ole Teutloff (Oxford)

PUBLICATIONS:

• "Revisiting the measurement of digital inclusion" (2023) World Bank Research Observer

As it becomes increasingly clear how central digital transformation is to development, the need for clarifying concepts and for coming up with standardized and accurate measures for digital inclusion becomes more urgent. Focusing on the internet as a foundational technology, this paper sets out a framework of core components of digital inclusion—including access/use, quality of access/use, affordability, and digital skills. The paper then surveys the ways these components are currently measured in household and firm surveys and by international organisations. Building on simple descriptive analysis of data from a wide range of sources, the paper highlights some of the often-overlooked weaknesses of current measures, and suggests possible improvements. The paper argues that (a) metrics for certain core components of digital inclusion—including quality of access/use and digital skills—are relatively underdeveloped, (b) some questions on technology use and skills may need to be adapted to developing country settings, (c) more attention should be paid to within-country inequalities in statistics reported by international organizations, (d) currently available digital inclusion indices are not very useful, and (e) there is much potential in using big data methods to measure digital inclusion. 

• "The labour market impacts of female internal migration: Evidence from the end of Apartheid" (2021) Regional Science and Urban Economics

Accepted version (ungated); Oxford CSAE Working Paper 2021:01 

Women often migrate within developing countries for different reasons than men and female migrants tend to be very differently distributed across economic sectors as compared to male migrants. This paper provides some of the first evidence on the labour market impacts of female internal migration, examining effects in both the productive and household sectors. I merge large sample migration data from South African censuses with detailed labour force survey data, and exploit substantial time-variation in female migrant inflows into over 200 districts. To identify the causal effects of migration on labour market outcomes, I make use of the unique history of South Africa to construct a plausibly exogenous shift-share instrument for female migrant concentration based on earlier male migration flows from reserves during the Apartheid period. I firstly find that this migration increases the employment and hours worked of high-skilled women (but not men). I demonstrate that this effect is driven by substitution in household work as many female migrants find work as domestic helpers. I also find that female migration leads to a (short-term) reduction in the employment of low-skilled female non-migrants suggesting an increase in competition at the bottom of the economic ladder.

WORKING PAPERS:

• "Minimum wages and economic shocks: Evidence from South Africa" (2023) IZA Working Paper

 with Joshua Merfeld (KDI School & IZA) (submitted)

This paper studies whether a minimum wage changes how labour markets respond to economic shocks. Using data from South Africa, we show that an agricultural minimum wage leads to higher mean wages with no significant impacts on mean employment. However, these positive aggregate outcomes hide important heterogeneity: the imposition of the minimum wage leads to substantial declines in employment – especially overall hours – in the sector in the wake of negative weather-related economic shocks, which typically exert downward pressure on wages. The increased variance of employment across years in the post-law period suggests caution in interpreting the overall welfare impacts of minimum wage laws. 

• "Agglomeration economies in a developing country: Evidence from geo-coded micro-panel data in South Africa" (2020) Draft 

There is a dearth of rigorous evidence on the productivity benefits of cities in developing countries. The few studies on developing countries to date have estimated much higher agglomeration elasticities than those found in developed countries, but these studies have generally been unable to control for sorting on unobservables or to work with the ideal geographic units. This paper estimates the effect of city population size on workers’ monthly wages in South Africa using a unique geo-coded panel micro-dataset where workers are tracked as they move across the country. Using individual fixed effects and an IV constructed from a novel dataset on historical population settlements, my preferred estimate for regional wage elasticity is approximately 0.03 (in line with estimates for developed countries). This estimate is robust to a large number of tests and considerably lower than existing estimates for other developing countries. I also find evidence that agglomeration externalities matter more than human capital externalities.

WORK-IN-PROGRESS:

• "Zoning laws and land value capture: Evidence from Rwanda" 

with Paul Brimble (Oxford), Guy Michaels (London School of Economics), and Tanner Regan (London Business School)

• • Grants awarded: IGC Early Career Researchers' Grant; Blavatnik School of Government Small Grant

PRE-PHD RESEARCH:

• "Analysing African LIC Labour Markets with a New Segmentation Model" (2017) DFID/IZA GLM/LIC Working Paper

with Haroon Bhorat (UCT), Morne Oosthuizen (UCT) and Kezia Lilenstein (UCT)

• "Day labour and Xenophobia in South Africa: The need for mixed methods approaches in policy-oriented research" (2013) Urban Forum