Date:
Location:
Today's Speaker
Speaker: Edmund Malesky (Duke), "Economic Uncertainty and Willingness to Learn about Globalization: A Field Experiment on Migrants and other Disadvantaged Groups in Vietnam"
Abstract
Research in political economy has long maintained that trade literacy is the province of the educated. We challenge this convention and propose that a globalization shock can incentivize disadvantaged populations to learn about its distributional effects. Of these groups, we suggest that internal migrants have the greatest incentives to educate themselves on factors that might improve their situation in the changing economy due to their unique combination of capacity to move and experience with discrimination upon arrival. To test our hypotheses, we field a randomized experiment in Vietnam by exposing half of a large nationally representative sample of respondents, including 812 migrants, to uncertainty about the economic effects of Vietnam’s entry into the European Union-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA). We then monitor willingness to learn by tracking whether respondents access an online video laying out the distributional impacts of the agreement. We find that treated migrants were 180% more likely to seek greater knowledge than those in the control group but find null effects for all other residents and members of vulnerable populations. Effects are strongest for relatively low-skilled “opportunity” migrants, who were pulled, not pushed, into the high growth manufacturing sector.
Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.
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See the seminar's full schedule at the Alesina Seminar page.
All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.