with Robert Genthner and Krisztina Kis-Katos, accepted, Journal of Development Economics
We analyze the effect of rising protectionism towards foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestic employment, exploiting revisions in Indonesia’s highly granular negative investment list and spatial variation in the initial location of affected firms. The increase in FDI restrictions led to local employment gains, accounting for about one-tenth of the aggregate employment growth observed in Indonesia between 2006 and 2016. These gains were accompanied by a reorganization of the local production structure and new firm entries in the manufacturing sector, particularly among small firms with fewer than 20 employees. While these results are consistent with an increase in the labor-to-capital ratio among regulated firms, we find that at least three-quarters of the employment gains are driven by indirect effects, including integration of firms in local value chains, and increased immigration. However, we do not find evidence of welfare gains at the local level.
with Andrea Cinque and Lennart Reiners, minor revisions, Journal of Development Economics
How do restrictions to international migration affect communities’ ability to cope with natural disasters? We exploit the implementation of an emigration ban for millions of Indonesians wanting to migrate to Saudi Arabia as a natural experiment. Our identification strategy relies on pre-determined migration networks and on the exogenous timing of the ban and of natural disasters. Using a panel of the universe of Indonesian villages and a triple difference approach, we demonstrate that poverty increases in wake of natural disasters are higher in communities with strong ex-ante migration ties to Saudi Arabia after the ban was implemented. This highlights the importance of international migration as a climate-change adaptation strategy.
with Friederike Lenel and Claudia Schupp, submitted
Students in low-income contexts often lack guidance in their career decisions which can lead to a misallocation of educational investments. We report on a randomized field experiment conducted with 1715 students in rural Cambodia and show that a half-day workshop designed to support adolescents in developing occupational aspirations increased educational investments. We document substantial heterogeneity in treatment effects by baseline student performance. While the workshop increased schooling efforts of high-performing students, treated low-performing students reduced their educational investments. We develop a simple model that explains why an information intervention can affect educational aspirations and investments in opposing directions.
submitted
We examine how shocks to migration opportunities affect schooling outcomes in origin communities. We focus on the migration between Mexico and the United States, and exploit the expansion of the Secure Communities program in the US — a federal data-sharing program that substantially increased the risk of deportation for illegal migrants— as exogenous shock to the attractiveness of illegal migration. Our results suggest that the Secure Communities program increased attendance, enrollment, and educational attainment in municipalities that had stronger migration network links with counties in the US that adopted the program early-on relative to municipalities that had ties with US counties that introduced the policy somewhat later. These results are consistent with the interpretation that the Secure Communities program raised the returns to education in Mexico by making low-skill migration to the US less attractive.
with Andrew D. Foster, new version coming soon. Non-technical summary. NBER WP.
We study the relationship between risk and schooling investment in a low-income setting. We show theoretically that parents respond to variance by reducing investment ex ante if the human capital production function exhibits dynamic complementarity and parental preferences for human capital are not too concave. We estimate the key parameters of the structural model, which suggest that the elimination of variance would result in a 15-18% increase in investments attributable to an ex ante response. We then use cross-village variation in risk over time and estimate an ex ante elasticity of study time with respect to variance of -0.05. Finally, we simulate the effects of an implicit social insurance program, modeled after the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). Our results suggest that the risk-reducing effect of the NREGS may offset adverse effects on child education that were evident during the NREGS phase-in due to rising wages.
"COVID-19 crisis, economic hardships and schooling outcomes" (with Friederike Lenel and Claudia Schupp), Education Finance and Policy. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00378. Ungated version. Data.
"Agricultural modernization and fertility: Evidence from the oil palm boom in Indonesia" (with Christoph Kubitza), Journal of Human Resources. 2021. https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.0520-10905R1. Ungated version. Data.
"Links between maternal employment and child nutrition in rural Tanzania" (with Bethelem Legesse Debela and Matin Qaim), American Journal of Agricultural Economics 103: 812-830. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajae.12113 (Open Access)
"Productive Effects of Public Works Programs: What do we know? What should we know?" (with Renate Hartwig), World Development 107: 111-124. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2018.02.031. Ungated version.
“An Employment Guarantee as risk insurance? Assessing the effects of the NREGA on agricultural production decisions”, World Bank Economic Review 33 (2): 413–435. 2019. doi: 10.1093/wber/lhw067. Ungated version. Data.
“Do cows have negative returns?” (with Michael Grimm), Economic Development and Cultural Change 66 (4): 676-707. https://doi.org/10.1086/697414. Ungated version.
“The insurability framework applied to agricultural microinsurance: What do we know, what can we learn?”, Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance, 39, pp. 264–279, 2014.
Information, beliefs and investments in education (with Sofia Badini, Friederike Lenel and Claudia Schupp, draft coming soon)
Labor-saving technical change and structural transformation (with Krisztina Kis-Katos, data collection in progress)
Parental resource allocation, educational inequalities between siblings, and their welfare effects in adulthood (funded)