Research

Publications

Technological Change and Domestic Outsourcing (with A. Bergeaud, C. Malgouyres, C. Mazet-Sonilhac)

Forthcoming at Journal of  Labor Economics

Do Skilled Migrants Compete with Native Workers? Analysis of a Selective Immigration Policy 

Forthcoming at Journal of Human Resources 

Working Papers

Global Mobile Inventors (with. D. Bahar, P. Choudhury, E. Miguelez)

Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Development Economics

The number of Global Mobile Inventors (GMIs), inventors moving across borders during their career, has increased more than tenfold over the past two decades, and the corridors of mobility have shifted towards a growing presence of emerging markets. We document that GMIs that have patented in a given technology before moving are 70\% more likely to be among the pioneering inventors in that technology once they arrive at destination, which we interpret as evidence of knowledge diffusion across borders. Returnees, which are typically inventors from emerging markets that go back after having spent some time in the US and other advanced economies, are twice as likely to file pioneering patents once returned than migrants when arriving abroad. Finally, we find that the more central the GMIs in the network of inventors during the early stages of the technology life-cycle at destination, the faster the technology-specific knowledge is absorbed by local inventors.

Talent Flows and the Geography of Knowledge Production: Evidence from Multinational Firms (with  D. Bahar, P. Choudhury, J. Sappenfield) 

HBS working paper

We investigate how reforms that ease or restrict inventor mobility affect both local and global innovation patterns. Leveraging a unique dataset that merges patent data with exhaustive information on work-related migration reforms that took place in 15 countries over 26 years, we employ a novel event-study approach. Our results show that reforms discouraging inventor mobility decrease the patenting of MNE subsidiaries within a country, while reforms encouraging it have a positive but much smaller effect. Building on the global nature of our exercise, we show that positive (negative) reforms adopted in the U.S. shifted innovation away from (toward) other countries, highlighting the existence of a global competition for talent. Finally, we provide evidence that policies easing migration have facilitated about half of the shift in the global share of innovation toward emerging markets.

Too Constrained to Grow. Analysis of Firms’ Response to the Alleviation of Skill Shortages  (with  F. Fontaine)

PSE working paper,  [updated version coming soon]

Skill shortages are a growing phenomenon in today’s societies, raising the question of their cost for the economy and of the effectiveness of policies aiming to reduce them. This paper aims to address the question by exploiting a French reform attracting immigrant workers within a list of technical occupations suffering from a scarcity of local labor. Findings reveal that incumbent firms located in markets more exposed to the reform react by hiring additional foreign labor in target occupations, which allows them to increase their revenues and total factor productivity. Results are concentrated in the manufacturing sector, and younger firms and firms located in slack labor markets benefit more than the average, revealing that these groups where particularly affected by shortages.

Selected Work in Progress

Digitalization, change in skill distance between occupations and worker mobility : a gravity model approach (with A. Dupuy, M. Raux)

The wage of temporary agency workers (with A. Bergeaud, P. Cahuc, C. Malgouyres, T. Zuber)

Pre-Doctoral Publications

Climate and poverty in Africa South of the Sahara (with C. Azzarri) 

World development, 2020, 125, 104691.

A spatial analysis of land use and cover change and agricultural performance: evidence from northern Ghana (with B. Haile, C. Azzarri, Z. Guo)

Environment and Development Economics, 2019, 24(1), 67-86.

Welfare effects of weather variability: Multi-country evidence from Africa south of the Sahara (with B. Haile, C. Azzarri, T.  Johnson)

PloS one, 2018, 13(11), e0206415.