Murad Zeynalli

Murad Zeynalli

PhD Candidate in Economics

To view my research statement, please click here.

Working Papers

The spatial correlation between worker skills and industry skill-intensity is amongst the best documented features of US economic geography. However, the causal impact of human capital on the industrial skill composition of US regions remains largely unknown. This paper studies how immigration-induced shifts in historical human capital affect the contemporary industrial skill composition of US counties. Leveraging quasi-random origin-by-destination immigration patterns from 1850 to 2010, I isolate exogenous variation in skill-specific local working-age population at the county level for 1970-2010. I find that an increase in medium- and high-skill worker shares raises employment and establishment shares in high-skill industries and reduces them in low-skill industries. The nontradable sector captures the major portion of the positive impacts, while the tradable sector absorbs the main fraction of the negative effects. The empirical findings are consistent with a CES model, in which representative firms with differentiated products employ labor of a certain skill type more intensively.

We utilize a novel identification strategy to quantify the impacts of religiosity on US local labor markets. Exploiting the quasi-random variation in historical immigration from 1850 to 2010 and origin-specific religiosity, we isolate exogenous variation in the religious composition of US commuting zones for 1940-2010. We find that, relative to the religiously Unaffiliated share, an exogenous increase in Protestant, Orthodox Christian, and ``Other” religious shares decreases employment and marriage shares, whereas Jewish share increases employment and college education shares along with mean income in commuting zones. The share of married women in the workforce falls with all religious shares except Jewish share. Our findings reveal substantial heterogeneity by gender. We demonstrate both the causal effect of religiosity and the heterogeneous impacts of different faiths.

Works in Progress

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, enacted in August 2012, provided temporary relief from deportation and granted work authorization to young undocumented immigrants. The existing literature has focused on the human capital and labor market effects of DACA, but the empirical evidence on its impacts on firms in industries employing low-skilled workers is limited. Leveraging DACA as a natural experiment and utilizing a triple difference estimator, I analyze how it affects firms. The treated group consists of DACA-eligible young undocumented workers in industries with a history of employing them, while the control group includes DACA-ineligible workers with similar profiles in the same industries. Additionally, I restrict the sample to young Mexican workers and construct an instrument for them using the administrative Matrícula Consular de Alta Seguridad (MCAS) dataset. The study furthers our understanding of the immigration policy effectiveness by providing new insights into its impacts on firms.