Mushfiq Mobarak

Internal migration and spatial reorganisation of agriculture While migrants and their urban destinations are extensively studied, less is known about how their departure transforms the rural economies they leave behind. Analysing Indian data, this article shows...

🌏 While migrants and their urban destinations are extensively studied, less is known about how their departure transforms the rural economies they leave behind.

📊 In Ideas for India, @mushfiq-econ.bsky.social & coauthors dig deeper.

📚 Read the newest EGC Perspectives article:

For large-scale social benefit programs, algorithms utilizing mobile phone metadata can be a cost-effective method for identifying the poor, from Emily Aiken, Anik Ashraf, Joshua Blumenstock, @guiterasecon.bsky.social, and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak https://www.nber.org/papers/w33919

A must-read open letter from Fields Medalists working in Switzerland.

Cutting annual budgets for education and research is always a short-sighted mistake. Even a bigger mistake now when there is a unique opportunity to attract top global talent from the US.

science-under-threat.com

Italy to issue half million non-EU work visas over next three years The move is part of a strategy to expand legal immigration channels in response to labor shortages.

This is a right-wing government with a policy on immigration that is responsive to domestic labor needs.
While other countries think about how much we can pay citizens to have babies domestically.
www.reuters.com/world/italy-...

Great Immigrants Great Americans: The Comic Series | Carnegie Corporation of New York

it's great to see @carnegiecorp.bsky.social celebrating naturalized citizens' contributions to the United States. Andrew Carnegie was himself an immigrant.
www.carnegie.org/news/article...

Migration and Development Conference in Paris. Deadline for paper submission: July 15.

RFK Jr. says US won’t donate to global vaccine effort Kennedy ripped into Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, in a video address at its pledging summit.

This is a travesty & a nightmare. The US was a founder of @gavi.org. It lowers global vaccine costs, has vaccinated 1B children, & averted 19M deaths. This pull out will cost 100s of thousands of children's lives a year - and RFK Jr will be personally responsible.
www.politico.com/news/2025/06...

The first photo is from either an April hike from Corniglia to Vernazza, or a hike from Corniglia to Manarola in the Liguria region of Italy. I believe it's Manarola, but I can check when I have better Wi-Fi. But any of those villages are well worth a visit.
Second photo is from our balcony 😅

Most beautiful places in the last couple of months

📣 Call for papers - 18th International Conference on #Migration and #Development

📅 Event held September 25-26, 2025 in Paris

🤝 With keynote's from: Paula Gobbi, @dmckenzie.bsky.social & @mushfiq-econ.bsky.social

⌛ Submit by July 15, 2025

#EconSky #Poverty #Inequality #Globalization

Scalable Targeting of Social Protection: When Do Algorithms Out-Perform Surveys and Community Knowledge? Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

New @nber.org working paper with emilylaiken.github.io, sites.google.com/view/anikash..., www.jblumenstock.com and @mushfiq-econ.bsky.social:
Scalable Targeting of Social Protection: When Do Algorithms Out-Perform Surveys and Community Knowledge?
www.nber.org/papers/w33919

Mobarak et al., 2025: "Scalable Targeting of Social Protection: When Do Algorithms Out-Perform Surveys and Community Knowledge?"

📃 A new EGC Discussion Paper by @mushfiq-econ.bsky.social (@yaleeconomics.bsky.social) & coauthors examines systems for identifying recipients of benefit transfers and studies how their cost-effectiveness varies with the scale and scope of the program.

📚 Read the paper:
egc.yale.edu/research/mob...

Congratulations! (This is quite a non-standard way to share with your friends that you got married.)

When Skilled Workers Go Abroad, Their Home Countries Experience ‘Brain Gain’ When skilled workers from poorer countries migrate to wealthy ones, there are benefits for the origin countries as well as workers and the host countries, according to new research co-authored by Yale...

insights.som.yale.edu/insights/whe...

"The countries that succeed are the ones that are able to create institutions that attract talent from wherever it happens to be born."

Is it "good" or "bad" when skilled people leave low-income countries? We summarized the evidence in favor of "brain gain" vs. "brain drain": www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....
Ungated PDF: johanneshaushofer.com/research

Brain Drain or Brain Gain? @catiabatista.bsky.social @danielhan.bsky.social @deanyang.bsky.social ‪
@econgaurav.bsky.social @dmckenzie.bsky.social
@mushfiq-econ.bsky.social Theoharides & @deanyang.bsky.social show w/ the right policies, high-skill emigration can bring new workers into the sector

Daughters Left Behind: How Trade Liberalization Harms Girls in China when Government Restricts Migration 28 May 2025, 12:30pm - 2:00pm Manor Road Building, Manor Road OX1 3UQ Mushfiq Mobarak (Yale University) - includes photo of Mushfiq Mobarak

Join us for the next CSAE Lunchtime Seminar 'Daughters Left Behind: How Trade Liberalization Harms Girls in China when Government Restricts Migration'

🗣️ @mushfiq-econ.bsky.social @yaleegc.bsky.social
📆Wed 28 May, 12:30, Room G, Manor Road Building, Oxford
ℹ️https://www.csae.ox.ac.uk/events

What happens to developing countries when highly-educated people migrate? See our new review of the evidence on "brain gain" vs. "brain drain": www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....
Ungated PDF: deanyang-econ.github.io/deanyang/fil... #EconSky #Migration

Unpacking the 2024 Student Revolution in Bangladesh Today (27 May) at 5 pm BST Mushfiq Mobarak (YALE) Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Marston Road, Oxford Register by 12 noon:

Last chance to register for the CSAE/OxCIS seminar today.

Unpacking the 2024 Student Revolution in Bangladesh
Today (27 May) at 5 pm BST
@mushfiq-econ.bsky.social, @yaleegc.bsky.social
Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Marston Road, Oxford
Register by 12 noon: www.oxcis.ac.uk/form/banglad...

How does high-skilled emigration affect countries of origin? A new review highlights what we’ve learned and what we still don’t know

How does high-skilled emigration affect countries of origin? I summarize our recent Science paper, &draw out lessons from where we need nuance (not all high-skilled is the same, & most studies lump together), what we don't know (especially how to do better policy) blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

🚨New @nber.org WP🚨
We use data on 42,000 households in #India to study how the agricultural sector copes w/ labour loss. As #farmers move to cities for higher wages, their left-behind families *don't* substitute with increased capital -- they downsize their farms. (1/2)

When Ideas Meet the Real World with Mushfiq Mobarak Development economist Mushfiq Mobarak explains how implementing new ideas can be complicated by politics, unintended consequences, and the complexities of human behavior.

💡Why is it so hard to implement a good idea?

@mushfiq-econ.bsky.social (EGC, @yaleeconomics.bsky.social @yalesom.bsky.social) on what happens when technically sound solutions meet politics, behavior, unintended consequences.

"Lessons from SOM" pod:
insights.som.yale.edu/podcasts/les... #GlobalDev

Brain drain or brain gain? Effects of high-skilled international emigration on origin countries How does emigration of highly educated citizens of low-income countries to high-income countries affect the economies of the origin countries? The direct effect is “brain drain”—a decrease in the coun...

Great new @science.org article by the rockstars of development economics looks at the evidence on the impact of skilled emigration on origin countries. TL;DR, it can be positive, but we need a *lot* more work in this area!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Re birthright citizenship: The potential chaos is the point. If there is ambiguity regarding who is a citizen and who isn’t, there is then more pretext for rounding up people for being here “illegally” and then making it hard or impossible to prove their citizenship

DOGE went looking for phone fraud at SSA — and found almost none Since SSA installed new anti-fraud checks on claims made over the phone, only two claims out of over 110,000 were found to likely be fraudulent, according to internal documents obtained by Nextgov/FCW...

Since SSA installed new anti-fraud checks on claims made over the phone, only two claims out of over 110,000 were found to likely be fraudulent (0.0018%)
Meanwhile the new DOGE-implemented system slowed retirement claim processing by 25%
www.nextgov.com/digital-gove...

CSAE Lunchtime Seminars Trinity 2025 poster. Listing all speakers with red, blue and white stripes.

The CSAE Lunchtime Seminars are back! Starting on 07 May, we've got a fantastic line-up for you:
🔸Sandra Sequeira, @lseid.bsky.social
🔸Elias Papaioannou, London Business School
🔸 @mushfiq-econ.bsky.social ,Yale
🔸Edward Miguel, UC, Berkeley
🔸Rohini Pande,Yale

www.csae.ox.ac.uk/events

Carnegie Corporation of New York Awards Fellowships to 26 Scholars Researching Political Polarization | Carnegie Corporation of New York The philanthropic foundation’s three-year, $18 million initiative supports interdisciplinary research into the causes of polarization and ways to mitigate it

📢 Announcing the 2025 Andrew #CarnegieFellows!

These 26 fellows have been awarded $200K each to examine the causes of political polarization — and how to reduce it.

🔗 Read more: carnegie.io/4lvr3kC

US Economy Is Set to Lose Billions as Foreign Tourists Stay Away The US economy is set to lose billions of dollars in revenue in 2025 from a pullback in foreign tourism and boycotts of American products, adding to a growing list of headwinds keeping recession risk ...

The US economy is set to lose billions of dollars in revenue in 2025 from a pullback in foreign tourism and boycotts of American products.

this is Mohsen Mahdawi, the green card holder who was just arrested by ICE for rendition at his citizenship interview