Sam Dodini

How should elected officials divine voters’ preferences about building more homes: through broad-based polls or the 12 people who show up at a community meeting on Tuesday night and yell for hours? Hard to say…

A strongly worded letter isn't gonna cut it.

There is a lot more detail in the paper, including tests to rule out people's favorite alternative explanations.

t.co/xObtAFPZOh

Greater labor market competition has an equalizing effect across workers & helps to reduce discrimination. But so does good information about where each worker stands in his/her true productivity--when employers don't rely on coarse proxies like demographic group.

What stands out is that in the concentrated markets, the firms most likely to hire non-Western immigrants have managers who have more prior work experience with immigrants-those who know their productivity best! Another signal of *information* & beliefs being the culprit.

Second-generation immigrants don't experience the same discriminatory gaps. Neither do immigrants who have been in the country for ~20 years or immigrants from western Europe & the US.

We use the richness of the data to rule out a bunch of other mechanisms like different job search, social networks, being hired at firms with immigrant managers, take-up of social programs, or sorting into different occupations. None of these explain the gaps.

What's remarkable is that these gaps are there even when both workers are displaced from the same firm but then re-hired into the same firm! In other words, the immigrant is paid far less than his co-worker at the same company even when they were paid the same before the layoff!

By the 4th year after the layoff, gaps even in the most concentrated labor markets close, implying the discrimination is based on beliefs about the average productivity differences between immigrants & natives.

So what kind of discrimination is this? Taste-based (prejudice/animus) or based on beliefs about their productivity (like statistical discrimination)? If tastes, there's not much reason for gaps between the workers to close. But beliefs can update over time & gaps will close.

Competition STRONGLY reduces discrimination among employers, but does not quite completely eliminate it (call it win for Becker). Next we measure if this is labor market power or product market power that matters. Looks like it's loading entirely on labor market power.

We find fairly small discriminatory gaps between non-Western immigrants & other workers in competitive markets, but large gaps in concentrated (less-competitive) markets. At HHI=0.25 (~4 equally sized employers for that occupation) the immigrants earn 26% less!

We measure market competition by the concentration (HHI) of employment in the year their firm closure or mass layoff. 1=one single employer for everyone in that occupation in their city. We then track the gaps between the worker pairs as they search in a diff-in-diff setting.

Suddenly, their firm closes, & they are forced to look for a new job. Prior to the firm closing, the market valued their skills EXACTLY the same. Immigrant-native gaps after their search can tell us about discrimination--especially the difference between the two pairs.

Imagine you have four workers-2 immigrants & 2 natives working at the same firm doing the same job for the same pay. One pair (1 immigrant & 1 native) work in a city where there are lots of employers that will hire for their occupation. For the other, there are fewer employers.

Our context is Norway--long considered one of the most egalitarian societies in the world--and discrimination against immigrants from outside of 'the West.' If we can find discrimination there, it's likely to be in other places. So how do we investigate this?

iza.org/publications...
A long history of economic theory says that sufficient competition should kill discrimination, but that's been mostly focused on product market competition. We look at the role of labor market competition in allowing for discrimination.

🚨🚨 Does labor market discrimination drive economic gaps? Can market competition eliminate discrimination like economic theory suggests? What *kind* of discrimination are we talking about. In a new paper, Alex Willen & I explore the question. #Econsky

Final_Version_of_Tarrifs_actualFINALcopy_version7_USETHISONE.docx

There is a lot more in the working paper!

Human capital retention matters in strategic sectors like healthcare, so policies should reflect the balance between these priorities and public systems should be responsive to local economic conditions.

www.iza.org/publications...

So what happened in Norway? We are not able to detect any measurable effect of the incoming commuters on mortality events, physician retention, or other metrics in Norway. There appears to have been no offsetting gain in Norway.

The effects hit hardest in areas with lower physician density before the commuting started. So the out-commuting of doctors increased inequality across classes and across places within Sweden.

These illnesses are more likely to require emergency care. Guess which physicians were most likely to commute? High-skilled, young, generalists--those most likely to staff emergency departments.

The effects are driven by lower-income people who are most dependent on the public healthcare system. The same is true for education, but the gradient is less steep. The effects are mostly drive by respiratory, infection, & circulatory illnesses.

In a dose-response diff-in-diff, areas with lower baseline physician wages lost more doctors to commuting and had significant increases in their mortality rates, particularly people age 65+. 1 log point lower baseline earnings increased 65+ mortality by 3 per 1,000.

Places with lower physician earnings in 2003 saw the biggest increases in this 'out-commuting' of physicians. These municipalities lost a substantial amount of human capital--brain drain--but not due to permanent migration.

Doctors were unique though. While nearly everyone else who started commuting to Norway lived near the border, doctors started doing more frequent and longer short stints in Norway--weekends, full weeks, or even months on end--coming from all over Sweden.

In 2004, wages in Norway started surging due to oil prices & major growth in labor demand. This made it highly attractive for Swedes to work in Norway. Suddenly, you could make nearly double your Swedish wage, and people responded!

www.iza.org/publications...

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What happens when you take a bunch of human capital out of a local economy? Is brain drain a real thing? And what are the consequences? In a new paper, we shed light on this in the context of highly developed economies: Sweden and Norway. #Econsky

As of Friday, there have been 46 cases in which federal judges have blocked Trump policies.

The rulings in those cases have come from 39 different judges appointed by 5 different presidents (of both parties) to 11 different district courts across 7 different circuits.

Maybe it's not the judges?