Tuesday, April 12th, 2022
12:30 – 2:00 p.m. EST
via Zoom
We study the economic impact of the March 2020 closure of the New Zealand border. The border closed in the middle of the fall RSE arrival season, causing seasonal migrants to not enter the country as planned. We identify firms that were expecting workers but the workers did not arrive before the border closure and compare these firms to other firms where the workers arrived just before the border closure. We study the firm-level response to these `missing migrants’. Did affected firms hire other workers? Did wages need to increase to do so? Was productivity lower as a result? We find that firms without migrants employed other workers — a combination of working holiday makers and New Zealand citizens/residents — and did not face lower employment levels. We find no evidence that firms without migrants increased wages for other workers. We find suggestive evidence that firms without migrants faced a productivity loss of up to 8\%, but this result is statistically insignificant.
About the Speaker:
Melanie Morten is a development economist who focuses on the migration of low-income people. Human mobility has long helped to determine people’s living conditions. Individuals move, both across and within countries, searching for better employment prospects, higher wages, and other opportunities. Beyond impacting individuals’ own outcomes, migration sometimes occurs at such a large scale that it affects the overall organization of economic activity within countries. Her work explores the causes and effects of different types of movement, including internal and international migration, temporary and permanent relocations, and within-city residential movements. She considers both the microeconomic and macroeconomic implications of migration and formulate spatial equilibrium models to understand how impacts in one location may spill over to other areas. Her research has been supported by several grants, including an NSF CAREER award and a Sloan Fellowship.
