Essays on International Worker Mobility
Creators: name: Woda, Bartosz
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: migration
subject: labor mobility
subject: bilateral labor agreements
subject: international treaties
subject: exchange rates
subject: Economics
subject: Law and Legal Studies
subject: Business and Economics
subject: Government Information and Law
subject: Social Sciences

description: In this dissertation, I investigate various aspects of international labor migration in different parts of the world. In the first chapter, I examine how migrants in the United Kingdom adjust their labor supply in response to exchange rate shocks of their home countries' currencies. I hypothesize that migrants from countries which are members of the European Union and the European Free Trade Agreement would respond differently from those whose countries are outside those organizations. The former group incurred much lower costs of moving into and out of the UK. I find that both groups reduce their labor supply in response to a depreciation of their home currencies (a favorable shock to the migrant), consistent with an income effect dominating a substitution effect, or income-targeting behavior. However, the EU/EFTA migrants respond by altering the timing of their return home while the non-EU/EFTA ones adjust their labor supply inside the UK. This result has implications for long-term consequences of the Brexit vote and immigration reform in the UK. The second chapter, coauthored with Adam Chilton, examines the impact of Bilateral Labor Agreements (BLAs) on migration and remittances. Research on the effects of those agreements is scarce due to substantial data limitations. In this chapter, we overcome those constraints by focusing on the Philippines, a particularly prolific signer of BLAs. We identify 68 different BLAs that the Philippines has signed with countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. We use administrative data on new work contracts and remittance flows and we do not find any concrete evidence that signing a new BLA has an impact on either worker deployment or remittances. This is consistent with the fact that BLAs often have vague and unenforcable provisions, likely to have little effect on the behavior of governments, firms, or workers. In the third chapter, I investigate how the heterogeneity of communication skills among less educated foreign-born individuals in the United States affects U.S.-born workers' occupational mobility response to immigration. I build on previous theoretical and empirical work and develop six different measures of foreign-born communication type, based on language ability, years since arrival in the U.S., and country of origin. I also construct an instrument which I argue is correlated with both foreign-born shares and communication types. I confirm the result from previous literature that immigration pushes native-born workers to specialize in more communication-intensive occupations, but I also find that this effect is weaker if the foreign-born are more productive in communication tasks. The latter effect is especially precise when communication type is measured with years since arrival in the U.S., which I interpret as suggesting that communication ability is a function of more than just English proficiency.