Awarded Best Third-Year Paper 2018  by NYU economics department.

This paper studies the impact of labor supply on the creation of new technology, exploiting a large exogenous shock to the US agricultural labor supply caused by the termination of the Bracero agreements between the US and Mexico at the end of 1964. Using a text-search algorithm allocating patents to crops, I show a negative labor-supply shock induced a sharp increase in innovation in technologies related to more affected crops. The effect is stronger for technology related to labor-intensive production tasks. Farm-value dynamics indicate that, despite the positive technology reaction, the policy change was undesirable for farm owners.

Awarded 2021 Prize in memory of Maria Concetta Chiuri by the Italian Society of Public Economics (SIEP) and 2022 Gaathon Prize for outstanding research on the Israeli economy

I develop a two-sided matching model of the labor market with search frictions and use it to study the impact of parental indirect professional connections on the first-job outcomes of children in Israel. Relying on identifying variation from the timing of job movements of parents’ coworkers, I find that connections double the probability of meeting and increase by 35% the likelihood of being hired given a meeting. The wage gap between the two major ethnic groups in Israel, Jews and Arabs, decreases by 12% when equalizing the groups’ connections but increases by 56% when prohibiting the hiring of connected workers.

Coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, WSJ, Behavioral Scientist, and Marginal Revolution

The United States first adopted immigration quotas for “undesirable” nationalities in 1921 and 1924 to stem the inflow of low-skilled Eastern and Southern Europeans (ESE). This paper investigates whether these quotas inadvertently hurt American science and invention. Detailed biographic data on the birth place, as well as immigration, education, and employment histories of more than 80,000 American scientists reveal a dramatic decline in the arrival of ESE-born scientists after 1924. An estimated 1,170 ESE-born scientists were missing from US science by the 1950s. To examine the effects of this change on invention, we compare changes in patenting by US scientists in the pre-quota fields of ESE-born scientists with changes in other fields in which US scientists were active inventors. Methodologically, we apply k-means clustering to scientist-level data on research topics to assign each scientists to a research field, and then compare changes in patenting for the pre-quota fields of ESE-born US scientists with the pre-quota fields of other US scientists. Baseline estimates indicate that the quotas led to 68 percent decline in US invention in ESE fields.  Decomposing this effect, we find that the quotas reduced not only the number of US scientists working in ESE fields, but also the number of patents per scientist. Firms that had employed ESE-born immigrants before the quotas experienced a 53 percent decline in invention. The quotas damaging effects on US invention persisted into the 1960s.

Non-technical summary: [Central Bureau of Statistics Bulletin: PDF]

Abstract: We study how job mobility, firms, and firm-ladder climbing can shape immigrants’ labor market success. Our context is the mass migration of former Soviet Union Jews to Israel during the 1990s. Once in Israel, these immigrants faced none of the legal barriers that are typically posed by migration regulations around the world, offering a unique backdrop to study undistorted immigrants’ job mobility and resulting unconstrained assimilation. Rich administrative data allows us to follow immigrants for up to three decades after arrival. Differential sorting across firms and differential pay-setting within firms both explain important shares of the initial immigrant-native wage gap and subsequent convergence dynamics. Moreover, immigrants are more mobile than natives and faster at climbing the firm ladder, even in the long term. As such, firm-to-firm mobility is a key driver of these immigrants’ long-run prosperity. Lastly, we quantify a previously undocumented job utility gap when accounting for non-wage amenities, which exacerbates immigrant-native disparities based on pay alone.

We estimate intergenerational mobility of immigrants and their children in fifteen receiving countries. We document large income gaps for first-generation immigrants that diminish in the second generation. Around half of the second-generation gap can be explained by differences in parental income, with the remainder due to differential rates of absolute mobility. The daughters of immigrants enjoy higher absolute mobility than daughters of locals in most destinations, while immigrant sons primarily enjoy this advantage in countries with long histories of immigration. Cross-country differences in absolute mobility are not driven by parental country-of-origin, but instead by destination labor markets and immigration policy.

Firms face significant constraints in their ability to differentiate pay by worker productivity. We show how these internal equity constraints generate a quantity-quality trade-off in hiring: firms which offer higher wages attract higher skilled workers, but cannot profitably employ lower skilled workers. In equilibrium, this mechanism leads to workplace segregation and pay dispersion even among ex-ante identical firms. Unlike in a conventional monopsony model, firms use higher pay to improve hiring quality, even at the cost of lower quantity. Our framework provides a novel interpretation of the (empirically successful) log additive AKM wage model, and shows how log additivity can be reconciled with sorting of high-skilled workers to high-paying firms. It can also rationalize a novel hump-shaped relationship between firm size and firm pay (which we document using Israeli data) and, by implication, the negligible wage return to firm size. Finally, our model provides new insights into aggregate-level and regional changes in worker-firm sorting and earnings inequality, firms' location choices, and public-private sector wage differentials---which we explore empirically.

Using Israeli administrative records, we study age-at-arrival effects on the cultural assimilation of Former Soviet Union Jews who migrated to Israel as children. Focusing on the arrival waves who left the USSR immediately following the 1989 unexpected lifting of Soviet emigration restrictions lends a plausibly causal interpretation to age-at-arrival effects. We leverage a revealed-preference measure of language acquisition---the language in which a person chooses to take the university admissions standardized test---to study Hebrew knowledge in early adulthood as a function of age at immigration. Then, given the different fertility norms in the USSR and Israel, we consider intermarriage with natives, age at first child, and completed fertility as cultural assimilation outcomes. We additionally propose an intra-family research design based on comparing siblings who arrived in Israel at different ages. Lastly, we put forward a mediation framework that quantifies the links in the causal chain going from age-at-arrival, Hebrew knowledge, intermarriage, and fertility.

An extended version of my MA Thesis, written under the supervision of Joseph Zeira.

This paper examines the impact of unbalanced (skill-biased) technical change on the labor market and economic growth. It argues that when the gap between the technology of skilled and unskilled workers increases, it becomes harder to acquire the skills required to work as a skilled worker; therefore, the economic output is an inverse U-shaped function of the technological gap. In the full model, I endogenies the technical change to reflect the incentives of the inventors. I show that in the long run, the economy converges to a steady state with a balanced growth of the technology of the two groups. The model simultaneously explains several phenomena observed in developed countries over the past few decades, such as an increase in wage inequality, a decrease in low-skilled wages, educational attainment slowdown and a productivity slowdown.