Michael A Clemens
Biographic Data
| ID | 1059005 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael A Clemens |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael A |
| FAMILY NAME | Clemens |
| SIGNATURE | CLEMENS M A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Center for Global Development |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1354-0965 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 299 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Migration from developing countries: Selection, income elasticity, and Simpson’s paradox
Human capital investment under exit options: Evidence from a natural quasi-experiment
Wage arbitrage through skilled emigration: Evidence from the Pacific Islands
Skilled workers in poor countries earn wages a fraction of that of their counterparts in rich nations. Here, we estimate the opportunities for wage arbitrage from emigration of workers from the Pacific Islands into Australia and New Zealand. Our calculations, based on wages earned by graduate accountants, computer science graduates and cooks with Certificate III qualifications, reveal wage premiums of a factor of up to 10 from emigration. Likewis…
Violence, development, and migration waves: Evidence from Central American child migrant apprehensions
The Place Premium: Bounding the Price Equivalent of Migration Barriers
Large international differences in the price of labor can be sustained by differences between workers or by natural and policy barriers to worker mobility. We use migrant selection theory and evidence to place lower bounds on the ad valorem equivalent of labor mobility barriers to the United States, with unique nationally representative microdata on both U.S. immigrant workers and workers in their 42 home countries. The average price equivalent o…
The Labor Market Effects of Refugee Waves: Reconciling Conflicting Results
Studies have reached conflicting conclusions regarding the labor market effects of exogenous refugee waves such as the Mariel Boatlift in Miami. The authors show that contradictory findings on the effects of the Mariel Boatlift can be explained by a large difference in the pre- and post-Boatlift racial composition in certain very small subsamples of workers in the Current Population Survey. This compositional change is specific to Miami and unrel…
The new economic case for migration restrictions: An assessment
Why Don't Remittances Appear to Affect Growth
While measured remittances by migrant workers have recently soared, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. We propose three new explanations for this puzzle. First, a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory – arising from changes in measurement. Second, cross‐country regressions may lack power to detect such growth effects. Third, remittances rise primarily with rising em…
Deterring Emigration with Foreign Aid: An Overview of Evidence from Low-Income Countries
In response to the recent migrant and refugee crisis, rich countries have redoubled policy efforts to deter future immigration from poor countries by addressing the "root causes" of migration. We review existing evidence on the effectiveness of such efforts. First, aid disbursements do not generally follow "root causes" rhetoric. The sectoral distribution of aid to migrant-origin countries does not significantly differ from its distribution in ot…
Split Decisions: Household Finance When a Policy Discontinuity Allocates Overseas Work
Temporary overseas work can both raise a family's income and split the household geographically, with theoretically ambiguous net effects on spending, finance, and labor supply decisions. We study a policy discontinuity in the Philippines that quasi-randomly assigned temporary, partial-household migration for high-wage jobs inKorea. This allows quasiexperimental estimates of reduced-form effects of migration. We find that migration causes large c…
PatrickKingsleyThe New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty‐First‐Century Refugee CrisisNew York: Liveright Publishing, 2017. 351 p. $26.95
I cannot think of a better entry point to Europe’s recent crisis of migration policy than this book. Patrick Kingsley has crafted an introduction-by-fire to the front lines of a crisis that many care about but few witness. The book's most powerful tool is its perspective. Readers experience the predicament and the journey through one Syrian man, Hashem al-Souki. Few who opine about the situation could name a single detail about the life of even o…
The New Role for the World Bank
The World Bank was founded to address what we would today call imperfections in international capital markets. Its founders thought that countries would borrow from the Bank temporarily until they grew enough to borrow commercially. Some critiques and analyses of the Bank are based on the assumption that this continues to be its role. For example, some argue that the growth of private capital flows to the developing world has rendered the Bank ir…
Skill Development and Regional Mobility: Lessons from the Australia-Pacific Technical College
Developing countries can lose part of their investment in training skilled workers who later emigrate. One innovative response is for migrants’ destination countries to help finance skilled emigrants’ training ex ante – linking skill creation and skill mobility. We describe one such project, the Australia-Pacific Technical College (APTC), which has financed vocational training in five Pacific island developing countries for employment both at hom…
Does development reduce migration?
The most basic economic theory suggests that rising incomes in developing countries will deter emigration from those countries, an idea that captivates policymakers in international aid and trade diplomacy. A lengthy literature and recent data suggest something quite different: that over the course of a “mobility transition”, emigration generally rises with economic development until countries reach upper-middle income, and only thereafter falls.…
Why Don't Remittances Appear to Affect Growth
Although measured remittances by migrant workers have soared in recent years, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. This paper reviews existing explanations for this puzzle and proposes three new ones. First, it offers evidence that a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory -- arising from changes in measurement, not changes in real financial flows. Second, it shows that…
Reprint of: Migration and Development Research is Moving Far Beyond Remittances
Migration and Development Research is Moving Far Beyond Remittances
Blunt Instruments: Avoiding Common Pitfalls in Identifying the Causes of Economic Growth
Concern has intensified in recent years that many instrumental variables used in widely-cited growth regressions may be invalid, weak, or both. Attempts to remedy this general problem remain inadequate. We show how a range of published studies can offer more evidence that their results are not spurious. Key steps include: grounding growth regressions in more generalized theoretical models, deployment of new methods for estimating sensitivity to v…
Split Decisions: Family Finance When a Policy Discontinuity ocates Overseas Work
Labor markets are increasingly global. Overseas work can enrich households but also split them geographically, with ambiguous net effects on decisions about work, investment, and education. These net effects, and their mechanisms, are poorly understood. This study investigates a policy discontinuity in the Philippines that resulted in quasi-random assignment of temporary, partial-household migration to high-wage jobs in Korea. This allows unusual…
Counting Chickens when they Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth
Journal Article Counting Chickens when they Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth Get access Michael A. Clemens, Michael A. Clemens Center for Global Development Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Steven Radelet, Steven Radelet United States Agency for International Development Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Rikhil R. Bhavnani, Rikhil R. Bhavnani University o…
Why were Latin America's tariffs so much higher than Asia's before 1950
Latin America had the highest tariffs in the world before 1914; Asia had the lowest. Heavily protected Latin America also boasted some of the most explosive belle époque growth, while open Asia registered some of the least. What brought the two regions to the opposite ends of the tariff policy spectrum? We find that limits to Asian tariff policy autonomy may have lowered tariffs substantially there, but by themselves they cannot explain why Asian…
Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk
What is the greatest single class of distortions in the global economy? One contender for this title is the tightly binding constraints on emigration from poor countries. Vast numbers of people in low-income countries want to emigrate from those countries but cannot. How large are the economic losses caused by barriers to emigration? Research on this question has been distinguished by its rarity and obscurity, but the few estimates we have should…
The Place Premium: Wage Differences for Identical Workers Across the US Border
This paper compares the wages of workers inside the United States to the wages of observably identical workers outside the United States-controlling for country of birth, country of education, years of education, work experience, sex, and rural-urban residence. This is made possible by new and uniquely rich microdata on the wages of over two million individual formal-sector wage-earners in 43 countries. The paper then uses five independent method…
The Place Premium: Wage Differences For Identical Workers Across The US Border
"This paper compares the wages of workers inside the United States to the wages of observably identical workers outside the United States-controlling for country of birth, country of education, years of education, work experience, sex, and rural-urban residence. This is made possible by new and uniquely rich microdata on the wages of over two million individual formal-sector wage-earners in 43 countries. The paper then uses five independent metho…
The Trouble with the MDGS: Confronting Expectations of Aid and Development Success
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are unlikely to be met by 2015, even if huge increases in development assistance materialize. The MDGs are a set of quantitative, time-bound targets for indicators such as poverty, education and mortality in developing countries adopted unanimously by the UN in 2000. However, the rates of progress required by many of the goals are at the edges of or beyond historical precedent. At the same time, there appea…
Counting Chickens when they Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth
Journal Article Counting Chickens when they Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth Get access Michael A. Clemens, Michael A. Clemens Center for Global Development Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Steven Radelet, Steven Radelet United States Agency for International Development Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Rikhil R. Bhavnani, Rikhil R. Bhavnani University o…
Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk
What is the greatest single class of distortions in the global economy? One contender for this title is the tightly binding constraints on emigration from poor countries. Vast numbers of people in low-income countries want to emigrate from those countries but cannot. How large are the economic losses caused by barriers to emigration? Research on this question has been distinguished by its rarity and obscurity, but the few estimates we have should…
Deterring Emigration with Foreign Aid: An Overview of Evidence from Low-Income Countries
In response to the recent migrant and refugee crisis, rich countries have redoubled policy efforts to deter future immigration from poor countries by addressing the "root causes" of migration. We review existing evidence on the effectiveness of such efforts. First, aid disbursements do not generally follow "root causes" rhetoric. The sectoral distribution of aid to migrant-origin countries does not significantly differ from its distribution in ot…
Why Don't Remittances Appear to Affect Growth
While measured remittances by migrant workers have recently soared, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. We propose three new explanations for this puzzle. First, a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory – arising from changes in measurement. Second, cross‐country regressions may lack power to detect such growth effects. Third, remittances rise primarily with rising em…
Wealth Bias in the First Global Capital Market Boom, 1870–1913
Why do rich countries receive the lion's share of international investment flows? Although this wealth bias is strong today, it was even stronger during the first global capital market boom before 1913. Very little of British capital exports went to poor countries, whether colonies or not. This paper constructs panel data for 34 countries that as a group received 92% of British capital. It concludes that international capital market failure had o…
The Trouble with the MDGS: Confronting Expectations of Aid and Development Success
Migration and Development Research is Moving Far Beyond Remittances
The Labor Market Effects of Refugee Waves: Reconciling Conflicting Results
Studies have reached conflicting conclusions regarding the labor market effects of exogenous refugee waves such as the Mariel Boatlift in Miami. The authors show that contradictory findings on the effects of the Mariel Boatlift can be explained by a large difference in the pre- and post-Boatlift racial composition in certain very small subsamples of workers in the Current Population Survey. This compositional change is specific to Miami and unrel…
Income per Natural: Measuring Development for People Rather Than Places
It is easy to learn the average income of a resident of El Salvador or Albania. But there is no systematic source of information on the average income of a Salvadoran or Albanian. We estimate a new statistic: income per natural-the mean annual income of all people born in a given country, regardless of where those people now reside. Income per natural often differs substantially from income per resident, both in its mean and in its distribution. …
Reprint of: Migration and Development Research is Moving Far Beyond Remittances
The new economic case for migration restrictions: An assessment
Violence, development, and migration waves: Evidence from Central American child migrant apprehensions
The New Role for the World Bank
The World Bank was founded to address what we would today call imperfections in international capital markets. Its founders thought that countries would borrow from the Bank temporarily until they grew enough to borrow commercially. Some critiques and analyses of the Bank are based on the assumption that this continues to be its role. For example, some argue that the growth of private capital flows to the developing world has rendered the Bank ir…
Why were Latin America's tariffs so much higher than Asia's before 1950
Latin America had the highest tariffs in the world before 1914; Asia had the lowest. Heavily protected Latin America also boasted some of the most explosive belle époque growth, while open Asia registered some of the least. What brought the two regions to the opposite ends of the tariff policy spectrum? We find that limits to Asian tariff policy autonomy may have lowered tariffs substantially there, but by themselves they cannot explain why Asian…
Migration from developing countries: Selection, income elasticity, and Simpson’s paradox
Human capital investment under exit options: Evidence from a natural quasi-experiment
Wage arbitrage through skilled emigration: Evidence from the Pacific Islands
Skilled workers in poor countries earn wages a fraction of that of their counterparts in rich nations. Here, we estimate the opportunities for wage arbitrage from emigration of workers from the Pacific Islands into Australia and New Zealand. Our calculations, based on wages earned by graduate accountants, computer science graduates and cooks with Certificate III qualifications, reveal wage premiums of a factor of up to 10 from emigration. Likewis…
PatrickKingsleyThe New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty‐First‐Century Refugee CrisisNew York: Liveright Publishing, 2017. 351 p. $26.95
I cannot think of a better entry point to Europe’s recent crisis of migration policy than this book. Patrick Kingsley has crafted an introduction-by-fire to the front lines of a crisis that many care about but few witness. The book's most powerful tool is its perspective. Readers experience the predicament and the journey through one Syrian man, Hashem al-Souki. Few who opine about the situation could name a single detail about the life of even o…
Wealth Bias in the First Global Capital Market Boom, 1870–1913
Why do rich countries receive the lion's share of international investment flows? Although this wealth bias is strong today, it was even stronger during the first global capital market boom before 1913. Very little of British capital exports went to poor countries, whether colonies or not. This paper constructs panel data for 34 countries that as a group received 92% of British capital. It concludes that international capital market failure had o…
Le mythe des 0,7: Origines et pertinence de la cible fixée pour l'aide internationale au développement
Comment quantifier l’aide internationale ? L’objectif de 0,7 % du RNB assigné aux pays riches est devenu la réponse standard de nombreux milieux officiels et une cause célèbre pour les activistes de l’aide. Les origines de cette cible soulèvent cependant des questions importantes quant à sa pertinence. Originellement, la cible des 0,7 % a été calculée en utilisant différentes hypothèses qui ne sont aujourd’hui plus valables et était justifiée par…
The Trouble with the MDGS: Confronting Expectations of Aid and Development Success
The Place Premium: Wage Differences For Identical Workers Across The US Border
"This paper compares the wages of workers inside the United States to the wages of observably identical workers outside the United States-controlling for country of birth, country of education, years of education, work experience, sex, and rural-urban residence. This is made possible by new and uniquely rich microdata on the wages of over two million individual formal-sector wage-earners in 43 countries. The paper then uses five independent metho…
The Trouble with the MDGS: Confronting Expectations of Aid and Development Success
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are unlikely to be met by 2015, even if huge increases in development assistance materialize. The MDGs are a set of quantitative, time-bound targets for indicators such as poverty, education and mortality in developing countries adopted unanimously by the UN in 2000. However, the rates of progress required by many of the goals are at the edges of or beyond historical precedent. At the same time, there appea…
Income per Natural: Measuring Development for People Rather Than Places
It is easy to learn the average income of a resident of El Salvador or Albania. But there is no systematic source of information on the average income of a Salvadoran or Albanian. We estimate a new statistic: income per natural-the mean annual income of all people born in a given country, regardless of where those people now reside. Income per natural often differs substantially from income per resident, both in its mean and in its distribution. …
The Place Premium: Wage Differences for Identical Workers Across the US Border
This paper compares the wages of workers inside the United States to the wages of observably identical workers outside the United States-controlling for country of birth, country of education, years of education, work experience, sex, and rural-urban residence. This is made possible by new and uniquely rich microdata on the wages of over two million individual formal-sector wage-earners in 43 countries. The paper then uses five independent method…
Why were Latin America's tariffs so much higher than Asia's before 1950
Latin America had the highest tariffs in the world before 1914; Asia had the lowest. Heavily protected Latin America also boasted some of the most explosive belle époque growth, while open Asia registered some of the least. What brought the two regions to the opposite ends of the tariff policy spectrum? We find that limits to Asian tariff policy autonomy may have lowered tariffs substantially there, but by themselves they cannot explain why Asian…
Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk
What is the greatest single class of distortions in the global economy? One contender for this title is the tightly binding constraints on emigration from poor countries. Vast numbers of people in low-income countries want to emigrate from those countries but cannot. How large are the economic losses caused by barriers to emigration? Research on this question has been distinguished by its rarity and obscurity, but the few estimates we have should…
Split Decisions: Family Finance When a Policy Discontinuity ocates Overseas Work
Labor markets are increasingly global. Overseas work can enrich households but also split them geographically, with ambiguous net effects on decisions about work, investment, and education. These net effects, and their mechanisms, are poorly understood. This study investigates a policy discontinuity in the Philippines that resulted in quasi-random assignment of temporary, partial-household migration to high-wage jobs in Korea. This allows unusual…
Counting Chickens when they Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth
Journal Article Counting Chickens when they Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth Get access Michael A. Clemens, Michael A. Clemens Center for Global Development Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Steven Radelet, Steven Radelet United States Agency for International Development Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Rikhil R. Bhavnani, Rikhil R. Bhavnani University o…
Blunt Instruments: Avoiding Common Pitfalls in Identifying the Causes of Economic Growth
Concern has intensified in recent years that many instrumental variables used in widely-cited growth regressions may be invalid, weak, or both. Attempts to remedy this general problem remain inadequate. We show how a range of published studies can offer more evidence that their results are not spurious. Key steps include: grounding growth regressions in more generalized theoretical models, deployment of new methods for estimating sensitivity to v…
Does development reduce migration?
The most basic economic theory suggests that rising incomes in developing countries will deter emigration from those countries, an idea that captivates policymakers in international aid and trade diplomacy. A lengthy literature and recent data suggest something quite different: that over the course of a “mobility transition”, emigration generally rises with economic development until countries reach upper-middle income, and only thereafter falls.…
Why Don't Remittances Appear to Affect Growth
Although measured remittances by migrant workers have soared in recent years, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. This paper reviews existing explanations for this puzzle and proposes three new ones. First, it offers evidence that a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory -- arising from changes in measurement, not changes in real financial flows. Second, it shows that…
Reprint of: Migration and Development Research is Moving Far Beyond Remittances
Migration and Development Research is Moving Far Beyond Remittances
Skill Development and Regional Mobility: Lessons from the Australia-Pacific Technical College
Developing countries can lose part of their investment in training skilled workers who later emigrate. One innovative response is for migrants’ destination countries to help finance skilled emigrants’ training ex ante – linking skill creation and skill mobility. We describe one such project, the Australia-Pacific Technical College (APTC), which has financed vocational training in five Pacific island developing countries for employment both at hom…
The New Role for the World Bank
The World Bank was founded to address what we would today call imperfections in international capital markets. Its founders thought that countries would borrow from the Bank temporarily until they grew enough to borrow commercially. Some critiques and analyses of the Bank are based on the assumption that this continues to be its role. For example, some argue that the growth of private capital flows to the developing world has rendered the Bank ir…
Split Decisions: Household Finance When a Policy Discontinuity Allocates Overseas Work
Temporary overseas work can both raise a family's income and split the household geographically, with theoretically ambiguous net effects on spending, finance, and labor supply decisions. We study a policy discontinuity in the Philippines that quasi-randomly assigned temporary, partial-household migration for high-wage jobs inKorea. This allows quasiexperimental estimates of reduced-form effects of migration. We find that migration causes large c…
PatrickKingsleyThe New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty‐First‐Century Refugee CrisisNew York: Liveright Publishing, 2017. 351 p. $26.95
I cannot think of a better entry point to Europe’s recent crisis of migration policy than this book. Patrick Kingsley has crafted an introduction-by-fire to the front lines of a crisis that many care about but few witness. The book's most powerful tool is its perspective. Readers experience the predicament and the journey through one Syrian man, Hashem al-Souki. Few who opine about the situation could name a single detail about the life of even o…
The new economic case for migration restrictions: An assessment
Why Don't Remittances Appear to Affect Growth
While measured remittances by migrant workers have recently soared, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. We propose three new explanations for this puzzle. First, a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory – arising from changes in measurement. Second, cross‐country regressions may lack power to detect such growth effects. Third, remittances rise primarily with rising em…
Deterring Emigration with Foreign Aid: An Overview of Evidence from Low-Income Countries
In response to the recent migrant and refugee crisis, rich countries have redoubled policy efforts to deter future immigration from poor countries by addressing the "root causes" of migration. We review existing evidence on the effectiveness of such efforts. First, aid disbursements do not generally follow "root causes" rhetoric. The sectoral distribution of aid to migrant-origin countries does not significantly differ from its distribution in ot…
The Place Premium: Bounding the Price Equivalent of Migration Barriers
Large international differences in the price of labor can be sustained by differences between workers or by natural and policy barriers to worker mobility. We use migrant selection theory and evidence to place lower bounds on the ad valorem equivalent of labor mobility barriers to the United States, with unique nationally representative microdata on both U.S. immigrant workers and workers in their 42 home countries. The average price equivalent o…
The Labor Market Effects of Refugee Waves: Reconciling Conflicting Results
Studies have reached conflicting conclusions regarding the labor market effects of exogenous refugee waves such as the Mariel Boatlift in Miami. The authors show that contradictory findings on the effects of the Mariel Boatlift can be explained by a large difference in the pre- and post-Boatlift racial composition in certain very small subsamples of workers in the Current Population Survey. This compositional change is specific to Miami and unrel…
Economics (25 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (20 works) · Political science (15 works) · Economic growth (12 works) · Demographic economics (11 works) · Geography (10 works) · Development economics (9 works) · Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth (8 works) · Labour economics (8 works) · Emigration (7 works)