John Firth is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame. His research lies in development economics, with particular focus on infrastructure, migration, trade, and the determinants of firm productivity. His fieldwork experience includes two years living in north India and working as a Research Associate with the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). He holds a BA in Philosophy from Notre Dame and a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT.
In this panel, Professor Firth, et al, describe a project that draws on passenger data from Indian Railways to construct novel measures of seasonal migration. In contrast with most existing measures of migration, their measure avoids the costs and unreliability associated with surveying, and captures the exact timings and locations of movements by low-skill laborers who travel for seasonal work. They succeed in validating their measure, showing that its broad patterns are consistent with the patterns found in existing data. Taking advantage of their measure's high frequency, they find clear evidence for the importance of seasonality in migration: for some of the most important migration routes, peak-season flows are two to three times greater than low-season flows. They show that the peak flows, often occurring around June, depend on the weather and agricultural conditions in migrants' rural home areas, and that migrants gravitate toward the urban areas offering the best prospects for higher wages.
Clément Imbert is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. He received his Ph.D. from the Paris School of Economics in 2012 and was previously Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and Nuffield College. His areas of research are development economics, labor economics, and public economics. His current projects focus on internal migration in Brazil, China, and India. He has also worked on randomized experiments to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of social programs and tax compliance in Belgium, Ethiopia, France, and India. He is an affiliate of BREAD, CEPR, EUDN, and JPAL.