Publications:
Firsin, O. (2023). How does offshoring affect the wage impact of immigration?. Economic Modelling, 106216. (link)
Firsin, O. (2022). Which Immigrants Promote Trade with Third Party Countries? On the Role of Geographic and Linguistic Proximity. Eastern Economic Journal, 48, 1-44. (link)
Working Papers:
Social Connections and COVID-19 Vaccination (with Arnab Basu and Nancy Chau). IZA Working Paper
On the Role of Farm Size Distribution in Explaining Cross-Country Variation in Agricultural Productivity
The stylized fact of the much greater gap in agricultural labor productivity than in non-agricultural labor productivity between high-income and low-income countries is one of the major puzzles in development economics literature, as factor mobility should limit excess gap. In this paper, we seek to test one of the potential explanations that has recently emerged in the literature (Adamopoulos and Restuccia (2014)). In accordance with this hypothesis, low-income countries feature policies that distort farm size distributions towards lower mean–in particular, crop-level taxes and subsidies produce a negative correlation between nominal rate of assistance and average farm size, thereby attracting more labor to small farms away from large ones; this leads to lower average labor productivity in developing countries due to lower labor productivity on small farms and explains a large part of the agricultural labor productivity gap between the rich and poor countries. We do not find support for this hypothesis. Using data from the most extensive number of national agricultural censuses we are aware of, we first show that the relationship between tax policy and average farm size is questionable, since there has not been a negative relationship between crop level nominal rate of assistance and average farm size for the crop in lowest income quintile countries since 1995. Next, in contrast to the unconditional relationship, we do not observe a relationship between average farm size and agricultural labor productivity controlling for primary and intermediate input use, institutional quality and country-specific unobservables. Neither the marginal effects nor variance decomposition analysis findings indicate the hypothesized connection either between crop-level tax policy and average farm size or between average farm size and agricultural labor productivity. This casts doubt on the claim that crop-level taxes explain a large portion of the difference in labor productivity between low-income and high-income countries; instead, it points to a simpler explanation–non-labor input quantity and quality.
Work in Progress:
Immigration Attitudes in the United States: A Comparison of Alternative Measures (with Shalise Ayromloo).
Labor Strike and Social Networks (with Nancy Chau and Huiyi Chen)
Immigration Attitudes and Immigrant Doctor Location Decisions (with Gary Lin).
Immigration and Offshoring Effects on Attitudes Towards Immigration.
Oligopsony and Agricultural Price Transmission Asymmetry.
Trade Liberalization and Returns to Vocational Education in India (with Tanvi Rao)