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Journal Article
Why Immigration Is an Urban Phenomenon
Immigration is fundamentally an urban phenomenon. Both in the United States and elsewhere, immigrants settle primarily in cities—especially high-wage, high cost-of-living cities. The most likely reason is that immigrants often send a significant share of their income back to their origin country. As a result, they value a city’s high wages and are less discouraged by the high living costs than native-born workers. Migration policies can reinforce this urban concentration pattern.
Working Paper
Floating Population: Migration With(Out) Family and the Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity
This paper argues that migrants’ decision to bring their dependent family members shapes their consumption behavior, their choice of destination, and their sensitivity to migration barriers. We document that in China: (i) rural migrants disproportionately move to expensive cities; (ii) in these cities they live without their family and in poorer housing conditions; and (iii) they remit more, especially when living without their family. We then develop a quantitative general equilibrium spatial model in which migrant households choose whether, how (with or without their family), and where to ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Second-Generation Rent Controls: New Evidence from Catalonia
Catalonia enacted a second-generation rental cap policy that affected only some municipalities and, within those, only units with prices above their “reference” price. We show that, as intended, the policy led to a reduction in rental prices, but with price increases at the bottom and price declines at the top of the distribution. The policy also affected supply, with exit at the top which is not compensated by entry at the bottom. We show that a model with quality differences in rental units rationalizes the empirical facts and allows us to compute the welfare consequences of the policy.
Working Paper
Labor Market Stability and Fertility Decisions
This paper studies how fertility decisions respond to an improvement in job stability using variation from the large and unexpected regularization of undocumented immigrants in Spain implemented during the first half of 2005. This policy change improved substantially the labor market opportunities of affected men and women, many of which left the informality of house keeping service sectors toward more formal, stable, and higher paying jobs in larger firms (Elias et al., 2023). In this paper, we estimate the effects of the regularization on fertility rates using two alternative ...