Published and Forthcoming
Self-Employment and Migration: Evidence from Mexico
American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings. May 2022
The Self-Employment Effects of Secure Communities in the United States (with Raffi Garcia).
Forthcoming, American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings.
Recipient of the best paper award on Hispanics’ Business and Entrepreneurship research by the Kauffman Foundation and the American Society of Hispanic Economists.
Working Papers
Immigrant Entrepreneurship in the United States: the Role of Pre-migration Work Experience
Immigrant entrepreneurship in the United State s has grown steadily in the last four decades. In this paper, I study the occupational choices of legal permanent residents in the US and their associated earnings in paid and self-employment. Making use of a unique data set with pre and post-migration individual-level information, I analyze the role of home country work experience of immigrants in their probability of becoming entrepreneurs in the US and their earnings after migration. To control for endogenous sector selection in the estimation of earnings distributions, I follow a novel identification strategy based on extremal quantile regressions that does not require exclusion restrictions or a large support variable. I find that foreign work experience in paid and self-employment is an important predictor of entrepreneurship after migration. However, it has a limited impact on earnings which are instead influenced by human capital, assimilation, and demographic characteristics. Overall, my results highlight the role played by immigrants' labor market performance in their home countries to better understand their outcomes in the US.
Business Ownership and Mexico-US Immigration
Mexico is one of the countries with the highest self-employment rates in the OECD. While most of the literature has analyzed the occupational choices of returning migrants, I study the relationship between business ownership and the probability of migration from Mexico to the US. I make use of longitudinal data from the Mexican Migration Project comprising different communities in Mexico over many years. Although running a business could allow individuals to accumulate the necessary resources to finance a costly trip to the US, it also raises the opportunity costs of leaving the country and could increase the attachment and non-pecuniary benefits of staying at home. Initial estimations show that individuals who own businesses are less likely to move to the US, suggesting that the type of occupation held at home is a relevant factor to better understand the phenomenon of Mexico-US immigration.
Family CEOs, Turnover, and Firm Performance
(with Barton Hamilton and Andrés Hincapié)
Using a unique hand-collected data set with information of the last two decades of the universe of public corporations in the US, we examine the role of family-related CEOs in firms’ financial performance, turnover practices, and R&D investment. We provide new evidence showing that firms with CEOs with family relations to other board members, and who have been working for a firm for longer periods of time, are less likely to be forced out of office relative to outsider CEOs. In contrast, we do not find differences in voluntary turnover between outsider or insider CEOs. We document that companies tend to appoint managers who were already working for the firm in another position and do not have family relationships within the organization. We find that managers with longer tenures achieve higher financial performance in the short run, invest less in research and development, and get paid less in case of an involuntary termination than outsider CEOs. Our results are consistent with the notion that family-related CEOs may face different incentives within a company compared to unrelated managers, which could affect firms’ outcomes and the interests of minority shareholders.
Work in Progress
Leave or Stay? The Role of Non-pecuniary Benefits in Workers’ Willingness to Remain in Agriculture
(with Rodolfo Nayga and Jeffrey Luckstead)
Immigration Enforcement, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation
(with Raffi Garcia)
(with Raffi Garcia)
