Published Papers

Immigration and Occupational Downgrading in Colombia (2024) [Link] [Replication Files] [Featured in Development Impact] (Published in Journal of Development Economics)

Between 2015-2019, approximately 1.8 million Venezuelans fled an economic and political crisis into neighboring Colombia. Despite being well-educated on average, these migrants disproportionately entered occupations that typically employ less-educated Colombians. I use a model of labor demand with imperfect substitutability between migrants and natives to study the effect of migrant occupational downgrading on native wages and inequality. Counterfactual scenarios reveal that migrant downgrading amplifies the negative wage effect of migration for natives without completed secondary schooling by 30%, and this increases to 80% after allowing for full capital adjustment in the long term. At the same time, migrant downgrading has little consequence for the wages of more-educated natives, who benefit from reduced competition but are harmed by reductions in aggregate productivity. The results highlight the consequences of migrant downgrading for wage inequality and productivity. In developing countries, these consequences are amplified by low imperfect substitutability across education groups.

Migrant Exposure and Anti-Migrant Sentiment: The Case of the Venezuelans Exodus (2024) with Jonathan Moreno-Medina, Salma Mousa, and Horacio Coral [Link] [Featured in VoxDev] (Published in Journal of Public Economics)

The global increase in refugee flows and anti-migrant politics has made it increasingly urgent to understand how migration translates into anti-migrant sentiment. We study the mass exodus of Venezuelans across Latin America, which coincided with an unprecedented decrease in migrant sentiment in the countries which received the most Venezuelans. However, we find no evidence that this decrease occurred in the regions within-country that received the most migrants. We do this using multiple migrant sentiment outcomes including survey measures and social media posts, multiple levels of geographic variation across seven Latin American countries, and an instrumental variable strategy. We find little evidence for heterogeneity along a range of characteristics related to labor market competition, public good scarcity, or crime. If anything, local migration increases migrant sentiment among those most directly exposed to these pressures. We also find that local migration induces meaningful, repeated contact between migrants and natives. The results are consistent with anti-migrant sentiment being driven by national-level narratives divorced from local experiences with migrants.

The Labor Market Effects of Venezuelan Migration to Colombia: Reconciling Conflicting Results (2022) [Link] [Replication files] (Published in IZA Journal of Development and Migration)

The recent mass migration of Venezuelans to Colombia has become a focal point for economists interested in the labor market effects of migration in developing countries. Existing papers studying this migration wave have consistently found negative effects on the hourly wages of native Colombians that are most concentrated among less-educated natives working in the informal sector. However, the magnitude and significance of this wage effect varies substantially across papers. I explore the potential specification choices that drive this variation. Differences in how migration is measured are particularly important: when a subset of migrants is excluded from the migration measure, according to characteristics such as time of arrival, this amounts to an omitted variable bias that will tend to inflate the estimated wage effect. In my own analysis based on the total migration rate across 79 metropolitan areas and using an instrument based on historical migrant locations, I estimate a native hourly wage effect of -1.05% from a 1 percentage point increase in the migrant share, or -.59% after controlling for regional time trends, alongside little-to-no effect on native employment. Native movements across occupation skill groups and geography are small and do not play a meaningful role in mitigating local wage effects. Wage effects are also larger in cities that have a higher baseline informality rate and lower ease of starting a business.

Working Papers

New Evidence on Inequality of Opportunity in Sub-Saharan Africa : More Unequal Than We Thought with Aziz Atamanov, Facundo Cuevas, and Daniel Gerszon Mahler [WB Working Paper] [Blog Post]

Unequal access to economic opportunity for individuals with different innate characteristics, such as ethnicity or parents’ socioeconomic status, is often seen as both morally undesirable and bad for economic growth. This paper estimates inequality of opportunity, or the share of inequality explained by birth characteristics, across 18 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper uses nationally representative household survey data harmonized to allow for cross-country comparisons. Using consumption per capita as the outcome, the findings show that inequality of opportunity in Sub-Saharan Africa is stark and more pronounced than previously estimated. On average, inherited circumstances explain more than half of inequality in the region. Estimates range from 40 to 60 percent in most countries and reach 74 percent in South Africa. The findings show that birthplace, parents’ education, and ethnicity tend to be the most significant contributors, but there is large variation in the importance of circumstances across countries. This represents the most comprehensive estimate of inequality of opportunity to date in the poorest and one of the most unequal regions in the world, and it underscores the pressing need for policy makers to intensify their efforts to address inequality of opportunity to foster societies that are more equitable and unlock the full potential for growth in the region.

Works in Progress

Intended and Unintended Consequences of a De Facto Inheritance Reform with Erica Field, Sabrin Beg, and Kate Vyborny

Parenthood, Gender Wage Gaps, and Labor Market Outcomes in Indonesia with Duncan Thomas, Daniel Yi Xu, and Xiao Yu Wang