WORKING PAPERS
Organization of Production and Technology Adoption: Evidence from Jewish Immigration and the Tailoring Industry in England, with H.Vipond (CSH Vienna), submitted
Presented at NBER Summer Institute 2025 DAE, Awarded the EHA Dissertation Fellowship 2024
This paper studies how the organization of production shapes the adoption of new technologies. We examine a shift in production organization in English tailoring induced by the arrival of Jewish tailors fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1905. When Jewish immigrant tailors arrived in England, native tailors were mostly self-employed and used sewing machines, introduced in the 1860s, to raise individual productivity. In Russia, where sewing machines were largely unavailable to them, Jewish tailors worked in ready-to-wear production, which involved a modular approach and greater collaboration within workshops. Upon arriving in England, they combined the sewing machines with their organizational practice to introduce the so-called "Jewish task system", which relied on an extensive division of labor and enabled clothing production to scale. Combining original data on production tasks with firm-level data, and using immigrant settlement patterns predating the introduction of the sewing machine as an instrument, we show that immigrant arrivals induced native tailors to reorganize production toward this system, accelerating both the diffusion of the sewing machine and England’s transition to mass-produced clothing. Our findings show that organizing production efficiently around a new technology is a prerequisite for its diffusion.
SELECTED WORK IN PROGRESS
The Dynamic Effect of Immigration along the Distribution of Wages, with G.Battiston (RF Berlin), C.Dustmann (UCL) and I.Preston (UCL) [draft available upon request]
This paper analyses the longer-term effects of immigration on native wages. We demonstrate that while immigrants downgrade considerably upon arrival, they rapidly upgrade through additional skill acquisition to realize their full earnings potential. Such movement of an arrival cohort leads competition effects to ripple through the wage distribution of natives. Many migrations are temporary; thus, while immigration causes a positive labour supply shock, return migration leads to negative supply shocks. We develop and estimate a dymanic model to study the competition effects of immigration in conjuction with immigrant assimilation and return migration. We use the model to assess the influence of each channel on the wage structure of natives. By considering the assimilation and return migration patters of various country of origin groups, we evaluate how policies that shape the composition of arrivals, can affect native wages in the long run.
The Impact of Parental Connections on the Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants, with M.Mertz (RF Research Unit)
This paper examines the influence of parental connections on the labor market outcomes of immigrant relative to native children. While recent research shows that children of immigrants often experience higher mobility rates than those of natives, the role of parental networks in shaping this mobility gap remains underexplored. Using Danish registry data, we investigate the impact of four types of parental connections: those formed in the workplace, within the same ethnic group, in the neighborhood, and during college. By leveraging variation in the timing of job movements of parents’ connections at the firm level, we evaluate the significance of each network type for the first job outcomes of immigrant children. We compare these effects to those experienced by children of comparable native parents to assess how differences in the type and effectiveness of parental networks contribute to the intergenerational mobility gap. Our findings shed light on the specific networks critical for the successful assimilation of second-generation immigrants, and reveal how parental connections contribute to disparities in labor market outcomes between immigrant and native children.
PUBLICATIONS
Inequality and Immigration, with C.Dustmann (UCL) and I.Preston (UCL), Oxford Open Economics, Volume 3, S1 (2024): i453–i473, as part of the IFS Deaton Review of Inequalities.
Coverage: Financial Times, VoxEU
This paper investigates the relationship between immigration and inequality in the UK over the past forty years. This is a period when the share of foreign-born in the UK population increased from 5.3% in 1975 to 13.4% in 2015. We evaluate the impact immigration had on wage inequality in the UK through two channels: the first is the effect on the earnings distribution of the natives and the second is the effect on the composition of the wage-earning population. We find both effects to be very small. We decompose wage inequality into inequality within the immigrant and native group and inequality between the two groups. We find inequality among immigrants to be consistently higher than inequality among natives. We also examine the impact of immigration on the fiscal budget, and the potentially unequal impact of the ensuing tax implications on natives. In the UK, where immigrants are net fiscal contributors, this is not a factor that aggravates economic inequality. Even though the impact of immigration is found to be small, the way it is perceived across different population groups in the UK varies; a fact mostly attributed to racial and cultural concerns rather than perceived economic competition.