Calendrier du 16 septembre 2020
Paris Migration Seminar
Du 16/09/2020 de 17:30 à 18:30
BECK KNUDSEN Anne Sofie (University of Copenhagen)
Those Who Stayed: Selection and Cultural Change in the Age of Mass Migration
This paper studies the cultural causes and consequences of mass emigration from Scandinavia in the 19th century. I test the hypothesis that people with individualistic traits were more likely to emigrate, because they faced lower costs of leaving established social networks behind. Data from population censuses and passenger lists confirm this hypothesis. Children who grew up in households with nonconformist naming practices, nuclear family structures, and weak ties to parents’ birthplaces were on average more likely to emigrate later in life. Selection was weaker under circumstances that reduced the social costs of emigration. This was the case with larger migration networks abroad, and in situations where people emigrated collectively. Based on these findings, I expect emigration to generate cultural change towards reduced individualism in migrant-sending locations, through a combination of initial compositional effects and intergenerational cultural transmission. This is confirmed in a cross-district setting with measures of actual cultural change over the medium and long run.
Development Economics Seminar
Du 16/09/2020 de 16:30 à 18:00
Salle R1.09 Campus Jourdan, 48 Bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
IMBERT Clément (SciencesPo)
Can information about job prospects improve the effectiveness of vocational training? Experimental evidence from a large training programme in India
écrit avec with Bhaskar Chakravorty, Wiji Arulampalam and Roland Rathelot.
Vocational training is commonly used to increase youth employment, but its effectiveness is often limited by the mismatch between youth expectations and jobs available to them. We provide information about job prospects to randomly chosen batches of DDU-GKY, a large-scale training programme in India. We find that better informed trainees are more likely to stay in the jobs in which they are placed. Our findings are consistent with two distinct mechanisms. First, information about job prospects improves selection into placement: it increases dropout of trainees with higher education (who have better outside options) and reduces dropout of trainees with lower education (who have worse outside options). Second, information improves trainees' job readiness: among males, and trainees with higher expectations at baseline, it increases employment unconditionally, i.e. independently from selection into placement. Our findings suggest that discussing job prospects during vocational training can enhance its effect on youth employment