Working Papers

The European Refugee Crisis and House Prices: Evidence from England and Wales (Joint with William D. Lastrapes)
We estimate the effect of asylum seeker dispersal on house prices in the UK from 2004 to 2015. Using two empirical models of house transactions prices and asylum seeker inflows, we find that asylum seekers have small but non-trivial negative effects on housing prices, but only for lower priced and lower quality housing units. Our panel data regressions rely on variation across time and local areas, and account for potential endogeneity bias using instrumental variables, to identify these causal effects. Time series regressions, on the other hand, depend only on plausibly exogenous nationwide inflows of new asylum seekers.

Globalization and Technology Diffusion: The Case of Mobile Phones
This paper examines to what degree trade, FDI and migration promote cellphone usage in developed and developing countries. Since the usage of cellphones requires the installation of costly infrastructure, I analyze the intensive and extensive margin of cellphone diffusion separately. Estimating a two-part model for 30 developed and 89 developing countries between 1985 and 2010, I find similar effects for both country groups: First, FDI accelerates cellphone usage along both the intensive and extensive margin, while the effect of trade is insignificant. Second, I establish a positive link between cellphone usage and migration along the intensive margin. However, this effect is muted by the migration of high skilled workers relative to low skilled workers. Evaluating the overall effect of migration at the mean indicates that the Brain Drain, in fact, more than offsets the positive spillovers from migration. Sensitivity analysis along several dimensions underline the robustness of these results.

The Spillover Effects of Public Investment: Implications for Formal and Informal Sector Firms in India (Joint with Santanu Chatterjee & Abhinav Narayanan)
NEW VERSION COMING SOON
This paper uses firm-level data on formal and informal production in the manufacturing sector in India to examine the sectoral consequences of government investment in public infrastructure. The average output elasticity of the flow of public investment for an informal sector firm is three times smaller than its formal counterpart. For the accumulated stock of public capital, this difference increases to a factor of seven. However, the sectoral size distribution of firms matters for the effects associated with public investment: for the formal sector, there is very little variation in the output elasticity of public investment across the size distribution of firms. On the other hand, the output elasticity for informal sector firms is strictly increasing in firm size. Further, the relationship between public investment and capital intensity in production for formal sector firms is negative, especially for firms in the middle of the size distribution. By contrast, the corresponding relationship is strictly positive and increasing with firm size for the informal sector, indicating strong complementarities

Work in Progress

Understanding the Aggregate and Distributional Impact of Remittances (Joint with Santanu Chatterjee and John Gibson)

The Contribution of Unobserved School Effects to Student Performance - Evidence from English Academies


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Williams College of Business
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Email: lebesmuehlbachert@xavier.edu