Personal website:
Contact:
References:
Professor Benoît Schmutz-Bloch, CREST, École polytechnique
Professor Pauline Rossi, CREST, École polytechnique
Professor Roland Rathelot, CREST, GENES
Professor Harris Selod, World Bank
Research fields:
Primary fields: Development Economics
Secondary fields: Urban Economics
Presentation:
I am a PhD candidate at CREST, Ecole polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris working under the supervision of Prof. Benoît Schmutz since September 2021.
My research lies at the intersection of urban, labour, and development economics. More specifically, I focus on how informal housing and informal employment relate to key challenges faced by cities in the developing world (e.g. disaster risk management, climate change, migration). I am also interested in spatial sporting and residential segregation.
Job Market Paper:
The Informality Trade-Off: Wages and Rural-Urban Migration in Developing Countries
Abstract: In rapidly urbanizing low- and middle-income countries, many rural migrants work in the informal sector, without benefits and for low wages. Would these migrants be better off if the informal sector did not exist? To answer this question, I develop a novel general-equilibrium model of rural-urban migration based on frictional job search and matching, which I estimate using South African micro data on workers. I find that the urban informal sector serves as a stepping-stone to urban formal jobs. Moreover, I find that it is a valuable outside option for urban formal workers and that its decline can increase the local labour market power of formal firms, which then offer lower wages. This phenomenon makes cities less attractive, even in the absence of direct job destruction, and is exacerbated by the response of rural firms that offer higher wages and retain potential migrants: after a tripling of monitoring costs, 2.2% of the total population decides not to move, equivalent to 2.7 years of urban growth at current rates. The corresponding rural-urban welfare gap falls from 29.2% to 25.5%. Overall, the decline in urban informality improves the allocation of labour, both across sectors in urban areas and towards more productive firms in rural areas. However, the aggregate impact is muted because there are now more workers in less productive areas.