DiSCourse Seminar with Marica Valente
27 January 2023, 12:00 (CET), hybrid
Digital Science Center, Innrain 15, 1st floor, Open Space Area or Big Blue Button
DiSCourse - The Digital Science Seminar Series on
Quantifying Informal Employment From Irregular Migration Shocks
Using machine learning methods in a difference-in-differences setting, we quantify the population of informal workers generated by an irregular migration shock. We exploit the exogenous variation from the Arab Spring wave on southern Italian coasts, and a rich data on Italian vineyards.
We identify informal employment caused by the shock from abnormal increases in reported (vs. predicted) labor productivity. We find unexplained increases in labor productivity for farms exposed to the shock, which translate into about one undeclared worker every three farms on average, or, equivalently, 23,000 workers over 2011-12. We also find that informal employment raises farm profits through lower labor costs, though it does not affect sales, grape prices, or wages of formal workers. We estimate tax evasion for about 75 million euros due to unpaid labor contributions.
Marica Valente, University of Innsbruck, Department of Economics and an associated researcher at DiSC
Marica Valente is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Innsbruck. She is an empirical microeconometrician and an environmental economist. She works on a variety of microeconomic topics, such as the environment, but also health, labor, conflicts, and illegality, using causal inference and machine learning tools. Marica Valente is Associate Editor of the Journal of Wine Economics and Frontiers in Climate. She is affiliated with DIW Berlin, Department of Energy, Transportation, and Environment, and the Research Institute for the Evaluation of Public Policies (IRVAPP FBK).