In this virtual seminar, Mushfiq Mobarak discusses his paper coauthored with Iffath Sharif and Maheshwor Shrestha, "Returns to Low-Skilled International Migration: Evidence from the Bangladesh-Malaysia Migration Lottery Program".
The paper presents a natural experiment in Bangladesh, where low-skilled male migrant workers to Malaysia were selected via a large-scale lottery program. Researchers tracked the households of lottery applicants and surveyed 3,512 lottery winners and losers. Five years after the lottery, 76 percent of the winners had migrated internationally compared with only 19 percent of the lottery losers. Using the lottery outcome as an instrument, the paper finds that the government intermediated migration increased the incomes of migrants by over 200 percent and their household per capita consumption by 22 percent. Furthermore, low-skilled international migration leads to large improvements in a wide array of household socioeconomic outcomes, including female involvement in key household decisions. Such large gains arise, at least in part, due to lower costs of government intermediation.
Mushfiq Mobarak is a Professor of Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics. He is also is the founder and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE) and an affiliate of EGC.