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Begin New Search Political Geography Asia Author Michael Clemens

1. Measuring the Spatial Misallocation of Labor: The Returns to India-Gulf Guest Work in a Natural Experiment

Author:
Michael Clemens
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development
Abstract:
‘Guest workers’ earn higher wages overseas on temporary low-skill employment visas. This wage gap can be used to measure gaps in the productivity of workers due to where they are, not who they are. This paper estimates the effects of guest work on Indian applicants to a construction job in the United Arab Emirates, where an economic crisis allocated guest work opportunities as-good-as-randomly among several thousand families. Guest work raised the return to poor families' labor by a factor of four, with little evidence of systematic fraud.
Topic:
Migration, Labor Issues, Migrant Workers, and Guest Workers
Political Geography:
India and Asia

2. Skilled Emigration and Skill Creation: A quasi-experiment

Author:
Satish Chand and Michael Clemens
Publication Date:
09-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development
Abstract:
Does the emigration of highly-skilled workers deplete local human capital? The answer is not obvious if migration prospects induce human capital formation. We analyze a unique natural quasi-experiment in the Republic of the Fiji Islands, where political shocks have provoked one of the largest recorded exoduses of skilled workers from a developing country. Mass emigration began unexpectedly and has occurred only in a well-defined subset of the population, creating a treatment group that foresaw likely emigration and two different quasi-control groups that did not. We use rich census and administrative micro data to address a range of concerns about experimental validity. This allows plausible causal attribution of post-shock changes in human capital accumulation to changes in emigration patterns. We show that high rates of emigration by tertiary-educated Fiji Islanders not only raised investment in tertiary education in Fiji; they moreover raised the stock of tertiary educated people in Fiji—net of departures.
Topic:
International Relations, Education, Markets, and Migration
Political Geography:
Asia and Australia/Pacific