North American Regional Science (NARSC) Conference - Ottawa 2012

My articles "The Impact of Migration on the Gender Wage Gap" and "How Unemployment, Inequality, Wages, and Migration Determine Violent Crime in Brazil Between 1980-2000." have been accepted for presentation at NARSC Conference in 2012. Furthermore, my co-author, Xiaoye Li, a PhD student at NUS, will be presenting our joint work: "Migration and the Decline of Social Capital in the U.S.: How Migration Lead to a Reduction in Volunteering between 2004-2010".

Public Policy article based on my research on Aceh, Indonesia

In the March 2012 issue of The WaterLeader, I published an article on: "Effective Aid Management in the Aftermath of Water Crisis: Lessons from Post-Tsunami Aceh". This article comes from my research on aid delivery in Aceh after the tsunami. You can read The WaterLeader Magazine here.

Open publication - Free publishing - More floods

Maids and School Teachers in World Bank Blog

David McKenzie posted on the World Bank Blog Development Impact in a post about the impact of low skilled migration on high skilled women's labour supply, mentioned my paper on this topic: "Maids and School Teachers: Low Skill Migration and High Skill Labor Supply. You can read his post here.

The Impact of Migration on the Gender Wage Gap

I am currently adding new material to my paper on: "The Impact of Migration on the Gender Wage Gap". Most of the previous work on changes in the gender wage gap over time have focused on the educational attainment and work experience of women. Furthermore, in using the Oxaca decomposition, these studies assume that men and women are perfect substitutes in production, which is inconsistent with on other work on gender discrimination. If men and women are imperfect substitutes in production, then changes in the labour participation of women will affect the gender wage gap not only truncating the wage distribution for women (who opt out of the market), but also by affecting the relative supply of women.
I directly estimate the elasticity of substitutions between men and women using a production function approach and simulate the impact of changes in the gender composition of migration on the relative wage of men and women. To the best of my knowledge this is the first paper to directly do so. In order to control for reverse causality I instrument for the change in the ratio of male to female workers in urban areas with rural-urban migrants (driven by rainfall shocks in rural areas and changes in transportation costs between rural and urban areas).
I find an elasticity of substitution between men and women of 1.78, far from being perfect substitutes. I use this result to simulate the impact of migration on the gender wage gap and find that the 5% decrease in the gender wage gap between 1991 and 2000 was in spite of the increase in the share of female migrants during this period, which, if everything else remained the same, would have increased the gender wage gap by 4%.

How Unemployment, Inequality, Wages, and Migration Determine Violent Crime in Brazil Between 1980-2000.

I am currently revising a first draft of my paper on "How Unemployment, Inequality, Wages, and Migration Determine Violent Crime in Brazil Between 1980-2000.". There is an extensive literature on the relationship between immigration and criminality. Previous work focusing on the reduced form relationship between the number of migrants and crime has found that areas that receive more migrants see an increase in crime. However, we don't know whether this correlation reflects the fact that migrants are more likely to commit crimes, inequality increases, wages decrease or unemployment increases. The mechanism through which migration affects crime is crucial for public policy. If migrants are more likely to commit crime, then we must address this with a more restrictive migration policy, while if crime increases due to changes in inequality, wages or unemployment can also be addressed with wither migration or labour policies. In this paper I use the 1980 to 2000 Brazilian Census to determine how migration affects the homicide rate in urban areas. In particular, I use variation in the response of high and low skill migrants from rural areas to weather shocks and transportation costs to identify the channel through which migration affects violent crime in urban areas. We find that areas that receive more migrants also see an increase in the number of homicides (consistent with previous studies), yet this is not due to the fact that migrants are more likely to commit crime but because of the  increase in income inequality.

Migration and the Decline of Social Capital in the U.S.: How Migration Lead to a Reduction in Volunteering between 2004-2010

I am currently finalizing a paper with a Xiaoye Li (PhD student at NUS) entitled: Migration and the Decline of Social Capital in the U.S.: How Migration Lead to a Reduction in Volunteering between 2004-2010. In this paper we use the Volunteer Supplement of the September Sample of the Current Population Survey (CPS) between 2004 and 2010, to look at how migration affects not only social capital (measured by membership in groups) but also investment in social capital (measured by volunteering and hours volunteered). After controlling for spatial sorting of migrants into different locations (by using Card's instrument) we find that areas that see an increase of 1% in immigrants see a decline in the number of volunteers by 5% to 10%. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to establish a link between migration and the decline of social capital described by Putnam (1996)