Paving the Way to Development: Costly Migration and Labor Market Integration

Abstract

and UCL/LSE for helpful comments. Anita Bhide provided excellent research assistance. Part of this work was completed while Morten was a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and their hospitality is greatly acknowledged. This paper previously circulated under the title "Migration, roads and labor market integration: Evidence from a planned capital city". Any errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Migrants leaving mega-cities: Where they move and why prices matter

“…The elasticities reveal that by far the largest effect on migrants' destination choice is that of a migrant leaving her or his state of birth. This captures the physical and social costs of moving and confirms that migration costs in Brazil are still high and a significant factor in labour mobility (Morten and Oliveira 2016). The effect of population size is equally large, which reflects the large gap in terms of city sizes between the metropolis and small towns.…”

“…Living costs are proxied with the amount of rent per room reported in the survey. If individuals do not report rent, the average rent in the microregião of residency is imputed (see Morten and Oliveira (2016), who use the same approach for Brazil). This is the most disaggregated available measure of prices for nontradable goods in Brazil.…”

International Migration Intentions and Illegal Costs: Evidence from Africa‐to‐Europe Smuggling Routes

“…We isolate a causal effect by exploiting the demise of the Gaddafi regime in 2011 as a natural experiment through which the network of migration routes offered by the smuggling industry expanded -in particular by opening up the Central Mediterranean Route (CMR) -thus reducing the distance between pairs of origin and destination countries in a very large portion of the world, namely Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Distance is a proxy for the transport costs of moving (see for example Disdier and Head (2008) looking at trade and Lucas (2001) and Morten and Oliveira (2016) on migration) and the lenght of migration routes directly affects the costs of illegal border crossing. We use the Libyan exogenous shock to smuggling distance across country-pairs as a source of identification of the impact of a change in the cost of migrating illegally on individual intentions to cross borders before and after 2011.…”

Structural Change Through Public Education Expenditure: Evidence From China

“…We measure agricultural labor productivity using total grain output over agricultural employment. Infrastructure, measured by road length over the provincial area, reduces migration cost by connecting rural and urban areas and thus promotes structural change (Morten and Oliveira ). Openness is measured by foreign direct investment (FDI) over GDP.…”