Sam Gyetvay

We study the effects of immigration on wages using matched employer-employee data from Germany throughout the opening of the German labor market to Central and Eastern Europe in 2011. We show that migrants and native-born workers are highly segregated across firms, even within narrowly defined markets, and that migrants are over-represented at low wage firms. Motivated by these facts, we derive the effects of a migrant labor supply shock on wages in a model of worker sorting across heterogeneous firms. Segregation moderates wage effects by reducing competition, and workers exposed to competition respond by reallocating across firms. To test these predictions, we extend the Card (2001) "ethnic enclave" instrument to isolate firm-specific migrant labor supply shocks. Consistent with the model, we find that firms cut wages and shed German workers, but that workers move to higher wage firms with lower migrant shares. Our suggest that inter-firm mobility is an important means by which the labor market adjusts to supply shocks, and can help explain the prevalence of null wage effects found in the literature.

We study the effects of a policy that restricted refugees in Germany from changing their region of residence for 3 years after receiving asylum. We use two different research designs to identify the causal effects of mobility restrictions on refugees' labor market outcomes. The first is a regression discontinuity design exploiting the fact that the policy was imposed on refugees who received asylum after December 31, 2015. The second research design is a matched event study comparing observably similar refugees further away from the discontinuity. We introduce a novel "double matching" procedure that balances both date of arrival and asylum wait time across treatment and control. We estimate the effects of mobility restrictions on employment, wages, firm choice, human capital accumulation, and benefit receipt. We estimate a structural model of location choice to quantify the welfare cost of the policy for refugees, and to estimate the counterfactual spatial distribution of refugees in the absence of mobility restrictions as well as under alternative proposed allocation schemes.

We study the effect of the repeal of mandatory retirement laws on hiring, wage-setting, and research productivity of Canadian university faculty using comprehensive administrative data from 1970-2022. Our research design exploits the age distribution of departments prior to repeal and the staggered repeal of mandatory retirement across provinces and schools.

We document two COVID-19–related risks, viral risk and employment risk, and their distributions across the Canadian population. The measurement of viral risk is based on the VSE COVID-19 Risk/Reward Assessment Tool, created to assist policy-makers in determining the impacts of pandemic-related economic shutdowns and re-openings. Women are more concentrated in high-viral-transmission-risk occupations, which is the source of their greater employment loss over the first part of the pandemic. They were also less likely to maintain contact with their former employers, reducing employment recovery rates. Low-educated workers face the same viral risk rates as high-educated workers but much higher employment losses. This is largely due to their lower likelihood of switching to working from home. For both women and the low-educated, existing inequities in their occupational distributions and living situations have resulted in them bearing a disproportionate amount of the risk emerging from the pandemic. Assortative matching in couples has tended to exacerbate risk inequities.