We are delighted to be able to announce that Gabriel Ulyssea has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for his project "Forced Migration and Development ".
The recent forced migration crisis has reached an impressive magnitude: by 2016, 68.5 million individuals had been forcibly displaced by violence, conflict and natural disasters. This crisis is vastly concentrated in developing countries, which host 85% of the world’s displaced population. Nevertheless, we still know relatively little about the economic consequences of forced migration in these countries.
FORCEDMIGDEV seeks to fill this gap. It is organized in complementary parts that analyse the two dimensions of forced migration – internal displacement and international migration (refugees) – which constitute very different economic phenomena.
The first part develops a structural model to analyse the longrun impacts of refugee inflows in developing countries. The model is estimated and used to investigate the effects of the Syrian refugees in Turkey, the largest host country in the world and answers questions that are relevant for developing but also developed host countries. What are the distributional effects of refugee shocks? What are the welfare effects across regions? What are the effects of providing refugees with a legal status?
The second part combines reduced-form and structural methods to investigate the effects of severe climate shocks on internal displacement and its impacts on economic development; the project takes advantage of unique data availability in Brazil to estimate the reduced-form effects of internal displacement on a broad array of outcomes at destination.
Ulyssea develops a novel quantitative spatial model that captures the equilibrium effects in origin and destination regions, while accounting for congestion and agglomeration externalities and labour market frictions; he estimates the model and uses it to assess the long-run, micro and macro effects of internal displacement in Brazil. This part lies on the underexplored intersection of climate and development economics, which has a large potential to open new avenues for future research.
The Grant is for five years, beginning on January 1st 2020.
Full details of all of the projects receiving ERC Starting Grants in this year’s funding round can be found here.
Gabriel Ulyssea is an Associate Professor, within the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford, A Research Affiliate at the CEPR and a Research Fellow at the IZA. His principal research interests include Development, Labor and Applied Microeconomics.
