Job Market Paper

Shock Propagation through Migrant Networks:
Evidence from Subnational Migration in the Spain-Ecuador Migration Corridor

International migration entails human and financial flows that can expose low-income communities to foreign economic shocks. This paper studies the Ecuador-Spain corridor during the Global Financial Crisis to investigate the impact of foreign labor market shocks on migrant origin communities. I leverage international survey and census data to craft an emigrant shift-share instrument estimating subnational Ecuadorian exposure to Spanish regional labor market downturns. Spanish shocks propagate to Ecuador, with more exposed Ecuadorian regions experiencing significant increases in return migration and reductions in remittance inflows. Spanish labor demand shocks impact Ecuadorian labor markets, as older segments of the population increase labor supply, wages for some less educated workers fall, and male construction employment declines.

Work in Progress

Emigration by Exodus: Minority Emigration and Economic Development in North African Decolonization

I investigate the near-universal emigration of European colonists and Sephardic Jewish minorities surrounding North African decolonization as natural experiments related to the impact of historical emigration on long-run development, leveraging archival censuses and contemporary survey and census microdata.