Mardi 16 avril 2019 — Séminaire DYNAMICS

RESUMES :

Marion Mercier (Univer­sité Paris-Dauphine)
The joint dyna­mics of emigra­tion and conflict : From peace-wrecking to peace-buil­ding diasporas (travail conjoint avec Fabio Mariani et Thierry Verdier)

Quali­ta­tive lite­ra­ture shows that many abroad-living commu­ni­ties of migrants have played a deci­sive role in conflicts occur­ring in their home country, and that the peace-wrecking or peace-buil­ding nature of their role has evolved over time. Based on country-level panel data, we empi­ri­cally inves­ti­gate the dynamic rela­tion­ship between emigra­tion and conflict in migrants’ country of origin. While country trajec­to­ries are diverse, we empha­size a recur­rent pattern where the initially posi­tive corre­la­tion between emigra­tion and violence becomes nega­tive over time. Evidence of a chan­ging dynamic rela­tion­ship between emigra­tion and conflict, based on OLS and on a gravity-based instru­men­ta­tion stra­tegy, consis­tently suggest that initially peace-wrecking emigra­tion tends to become peace-buil­ding. We build a two-group theo­re­tical model of conflict allo­wing migrants to interact with the home economy, in order to enlighten these empi­rical results. While migrants’ invol­ve­ment in the conflict of their home country is likely to parti­ci­pate to violence esca­la­tion in a static frame­work, we find that, over time, the evolu­tion of the number and charac­te­ris­tics of emigrants can make abroad-living commu­ni­ties become a peace-buil­ding force for the origin country.

Marlon Seror (Univer­sity of Bristol)
Migrants and Firms : Evidence from China (travail conjoint avec Clement Imbert et Yifan Zhang)

This paper provides causal empi­rical evidence that rural-urban migra­tion lowers urban firm produc­ti­vity in deve­lo­ping coun­tries. We use longi­tu­dinal data on Chinese manu­fac­tu­ring firms between 2001 and 2006, and exploit exoge­nous varia­tion in rural-urban migra­tion due to agri­cul­tural price shocks for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. We find that follo­wing a migrant inflow, labor costs decline and employ­ment grows. Within firm, labor produc­ti­vity decreases sharply and remains low in the longer run. Within industry and loca­tion, it is low-produc­ti­vity firms that grow the most, so that aggre­gate labor produc­ti­vity falls even faster. Since migrants favor high-produc­ti­vity desti­na­tions, migra­tion strongly equa­lizes factor produc­ti­vity across locations.