Upcoming events
Misum Open Seminar
Parental Income in the Labor Market
Jean-William Laliberte is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Calgary, and an IZA Research Affiliate.His research interests are in labour and public economics, with a focus on the economics of education, intergenerational mobility and applied econometrics.
Abstract:
Are children of high-income families more likely to work at better-paying firms, and if so, why? To answer these questions, we use Canadian administrative data to construct an employee-employer-parent-child matched dataset, which we link to detailed educational records. We use these data to quantify the role of observable human capital (education) and social connections for firm sorting. We find that, in an accounting sense, access to high-paying employers explains roughly half of the transmission of income across generations, as measured by the income rank-rank relationship. Probing mechanisms contributing to the sorting of high-income children to high-paying employers, we find the explanatory power of education largely exceeds that of social connections. We further provide suggestive evidence that some children of high-income families receive preferential treatment when they work at firms their parents own, but the quantitative importance of this phenomenon for overall intergenerational income mobility remains limited.
Seminar Topic:
Seasonal Poverty and Internal Migration: A Research Agenda in Bangladesh and Nepal
About Mushfiq
Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is the Jerome Kasoff ’54 Professor of Management and Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics (Faculty of Arts and Sciences). Mobarak is the founder and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE).mMobarak has several ongoing research projects in Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, and Nepal. He conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare-improving. He also examines the complexities of scaling up development interventions that are proven effective in such trials.
Abstract:
A large literature, including the World Bank’s 2023 World Development Report, explores the interlinkages between international migration and economic development. But most human mobility in the world is within-country, not across international borders. The talk will outline a research agenda and open questions around the causes and consequences of internal, within-country migration, as well as the opportunities and impediments associated with such movements. Much of that movement in seasonal and circular, in response to seasonal deprivation during pre-harvest lean periods. We will then pivot to discussing the details of a research paper titled “Remittance Constraints and Seasonal Poverty.” Rural households send migrants to mitigate seasonal deprivation, but remittances don't always arrive in time. We observe a counter-intuitive pattern in Nepal where remittances are low when rural residents are food insecure, and migrants return with remittances later during harvest. To overcome this apparent remittance constraint indirectly, we provide a $90 loan to randomly-selected rural households during the pre-harvest lean season. Harvest period remittances increase in loan- recipient households, and 89% of the loan principal is repaid. Food security improves, and those households increase fertilizer use and own-farm labor. That increases their rice harvest, revenues, and subjective well-being. In a two-period model of household decision-making, we show that remittance frictions are necessary to qualitatively match our experimental results.
This Misum-Economics Seminar, will take place at the Stockholm School of Economics on Monday, June 2nd from 15:00-16:30 in room Torsten.
You can register here.