Murad Zeynalli

Murad Zeynalli

PhD Candidate in Economics

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Working Papers

The spatial correlation between worker skills and industry skill-intensity has been documented. However, the causal impact of human capital on the industrial skill composition of US regions through historical persistence remains largely unknown. This paper studies how immigration-induced exogenous shifts in local human capital affect the industrial skill composition of employment and establishment shares in 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 population 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 religiosity shocks at the commuting zone level for the 1940-2010 period. We find that, relative to the Unaffiliated share, an exogenous increase in Protestant, Liminal and 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 provide suggestive evidence that these results are partially driven by the ancestral compositions of US commuting zones.

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.