Murad Zeynalli

Murad Zeynalli

PhD Candidate in Economics

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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

Undocumented immigration remains a central issue within US immigration policy debates, yet little is known about how legalization programs affect firm dynamics and labor market composition. In this paper, I study the impact of a particular legalization reform, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), enacted in 2012, on establishment and employment outcomes. I exploit variation in pre-treatment exposure to the policy in sectors and commuting zones, using a triple-difference estimator. I find that DACA increases establishment entry by 2.4 percent in more exposed sectors and temporarily reduces exit rates, suggesting market expansion and entrepreneurship amongst formerly undocumented workers. The share of native workers rises by 2.1 percentage points, whereas that of ineligible undocumented workers declines by a similar magnitude, demonstrating labor substitution. Heterogeneity estimates across sectoral skill types reveal that these effects are concentrated in low- and medium-skill sectors. These results have important policy implications such that immigrant regularization can enhance firm dynamism and facilitate labor reallocation, without displacing native workers.