Misum-Economics seminar with Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak
About the speaker
Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is the Jerome Kasoff ’54 Professor of Management and Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics (Faculty of Arts and Sciences). Mobarak is the founder and faculty director of the . Mobarak has several ongoing projects in , , and Nepal. He conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare-improving. He also examines the complexities of scaling up development interventions that are proven effective in such trials.
Read more about his research .
About the event
A large literature, including the World Bank’s 2023 World Development Report, explores the interlinkages between international migration and economic development. But most human mobility in the world is within-country, not across international borders. The talk will outline a research agenda and open questions around the causes and consequences of internal, within-country migration, as well as the opportunities and impediments associated with such movements. Much of that movement in seasonal and circular, in response to seasonal deprivation during pre-harvest lean periods. We will then pivot to discussing the details of a research paper titled “Remittance Constraints and Seasonal Poverty.” Rural households send migrants to mitigate seasonal deprivation, but remittances don't always arrive in time. We observe a counter-intuitive pattern in Nepal where remittances are low when rural residents are food insecure, and migrants return with remittances later during harvest. To overcome this apparent remittance constraint indirectly, we provide a $90 loan to randomly-selected rural households during the pre-harvest lean season. Harvest period remittances increase in loan- recipient households, and 89% of the loan principal is repaid. Food security improves, and those households increase fertilizer use and own-farm labor. That increases their rice harvest, revenues, and subjective well-being. In a two-period model of household decision-making, we show that remittance frictions are necessary to qualitatively match our experimental results.
This Misum-Economics Seminar will take place at the 海角社区下载on Monday, June 2nd from 15:00-16:30 in room Torsten.
Please register your attendance .
related events
Brown Bag Seminar - Zoltán Rácz (SHoF/SSE)
Room Ragnar, SSE main building, entrance via Bertil Ohlins Gata 4 at 12:05
Brown Bag Seminar - Jan Starmans (SHoF/SSE)
Room Ragnar, SSE main building, entrance via Bertil Ohlins Gata 4 at 12:05
Friday Seminar - Atif Mian (Princeton University)
Room Heckscher-Ohlin, SSE main building, entrance via Bertil Ohlins Gata 4 at 10:30