Essays On Economic Migration And Public Economics

Author : Cynthia van der Werf Cuadros
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (721 download)

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Download or read book Essays on Economic Migration and Public Economics written by Cynthia van der Werf Cuadros and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation adds to our understanding of how public policies support disadvantaged populations and how spillovers of those policies affect the population as a whole. It contributes to the literature by examining how language classes generate host-country specific skills, and promote the economic and cultural integration of refugees. It also adds to our understanding of the consequences of refugee reallocation on natives' outcomes by determining whether refugee' influx affects the academic achievement of native children. Finally, it studies how the Food Stamp program also benefits non-participants as it increases the availability of food and raises employment in the food retail industry. Chapter 1, studies how the largest inflow of refugees in U.S. history - the inflow of Indochinese refugees at the end of the Vietnam War - affected native children's academic achievement and post-secondary education. To identify the causal effect of refugees on native students' academic success, I use novel data from the U.S. National Archives that contain refugees' first county of destination. This was determined by resettlement agencies and, as I will show, was uncorrelated with previous schooling conditions. I find zero or small positive effects from the inflow of Indochinese refugees on native children's academic achievement. These estimates are small and precisely estimated. There is also evidence of an improvement in the quality of native students' post-secondary education as native students were more likely to complete bachelor and graduate degrees if they were living in counties where refugees were a higher share of the population. Chapter 2, joint work with Mette Foged, examines whether language classes for newly resettled refugees in Denmark promote their economic integration. We use travel time by public transport to language training centers as an instrument for host-country language acquisition by refugees to show that language instruction has a strong positive effect on proficiency in the host-country language and enrollment in formal education in the host country. As refugees are dispersed across municipalities and allocated to public housing in the municipalities based on availability at the date of arrival, travel time is uncorrelated with refugees' characteristics at arrival. Moreover, we also exploit variation in travel time that results from the opening and closure of language training centers. We find positive effects on employment and annual earnings but our IV results are not significant. The increase in earnings comes mainly from the extensive margin as we find no evidence of a positive effect on hours of work per week or hourly wage. The findings suggest that language instructions increase language proficiency and stimulate immigrants to invest in human capital which likely delays and increases any positive labor market return to early language learning investments. Interestingly, we find similar effects for men and women. Chapter 3, joint work with Timothy K.M. Beatty and Marianne P. Bitler, studies how food assistance programs shape the retail food environment. Food assistance is a large part of the food economy, with SNAP redemptions totaling $76 billion in 2013, or more than 10% of sales at supermarkets. Yet, we know next to nothing about how these programs affect food stores. We fill this gap, using a validated causal research strategy from the literature. Did the roll-out of Food Stamps during the 1960s and 1970s affect the retail environment at the time? We find that locations with earlier Food Stamp programs have more food stores, more workers in those stores, and higher real sales.