Ashish Shenoy

Position Title

Executive Committee Member

Associate Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics

2153 Social Science and Humanities Building

Ashish Shenoy is a development economist in the department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. His work focuses on migration and rural-urban gaps in South, Southeast, and East Asia. Currently, he is investigating how landless workers in rural Bangladesh use temporary migration to support their income through the agricultural lean season. In other research, Dr. Shenoy studies the spatial distribution of earnings in Thailand and determinants of the local cost of living in China. This research aims to characterize economic inefficiency and evaluate the potential for growth driven by greater migration. Dr. Shenoy earned his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in June 2016 and served as a visiting fellow at Yale University from June to December 2016 before joining the faculty at UC Davis.

Content by Ashish Shenoy

Migration and resilience during a global crisis

Author(s)

Nathan Barker, C.Austin Davis, Paula López-Peña, Harrison Mitchell, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Karim Naguib, Maira Emy Reimão, Ashish Shenoy, Corey Vernot

Published in

European Economic Reiview

Publication Date

September 14, 2023

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between migration and household resilience during a global crisis that eliminated the option to migrate. We link prior data from four populations in Bangladesh and Nepal to new phone surveys conducted during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. While earnings fell universally, pandemic-induced declines were 14%–25% greater among previously migration-dependent households and urban migrant workers, with household remittance losses far exceeding official statistics. Heightened economic exposure during the pandemic erased prior gains achieved by transnational migrants and caused fourfold greater prevalence of food insecurity among domestic subsistence migrants. Economic distress spilled over onto non-migrants in high-migration villages and labor markets. We show that migration contributed to economic contagion independent of its role in disease transmission. Losing the option to migrate differentially increased the vulnerability of migration-dependent households during a crisis.

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Migration Frictions, Earnings Differentials, and Spatial Misallocation: Evidence from Thailand

Author(s)

Ashish Shenoy

Published in

Journal of Southeast Asian Economies

Publication Date

July 03, 2023

Abstract: This paper uses revealed-preference location decisions of workers in Thailand to quantify the disutility of labor migration, characterize the migration contribution to labor supply elasticity, and estimate the effect of migration frictions on spatial earnings differentials and labor misallocation. I estimate a spatial equilibrium model using commodity prices as instruments for local earnings to overcome endogeneity and selection, and to identify the NPV returns to potential migration. Estimation employs a novel strategy to accommodate measurement error and choice-based sampling. I find migration contributes 9.5 percentage points to local labor supply elasticity. The disutility from migration is 1.0–1.2 times annual earnings; alleviating this friction would induce a quarter of the population to relocate and would lower spatial earnings variation by 20%. However, gains would be realized primarily in non-wage utility with a modest 3% increase in national product, suggesting migration frictions play a limited role in productive misallocation.

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Delegation Risk and Implementation at Scale: Evidence from a Migration Loan Program in Bangladesh

Author(s)

Ashish Shenoy and coauthors.

Publication Date

June 26, 2023

Many economic policies show promising pilot results that fail to replicate at scale. We demonstrate how delegation of authority to implementing agents can threaten scalability in a randomized evaluation of a migration loan program in Bangladesh. Pilot evaluations found the loan offer to increase temporary migration by 25–40p.p., but this effect fell to 12p.p. at scale. To explain the attenuation, we introduce a theory of delegation risk that leads implementing agents to systematically mistarget intended program beneficiaries. Mistargeting occurs because benefits are concentrated among those enabled to migrate with a loan—i.e. program compliers—but capacity constraints lead effort to be directed toward those already planning to migrate—i.e. always-takers. We present evidence consistent with this theory that the characteristics that predict pre-loan migration are strongly correlated with the likelihood of remembering the loan offer in endline surveying, and we show delegation risk can quantitatively account for the diminished treatment effect. Policy impacts are further tempered by expansion to adjacent geographic regions despite participants being observably similar. We rule out two additional explanations: First, our geographically clustered randomization design reveals treatment intensity crowds in rather than crowds out migrants. Second, changes in population characteristics over time appear to have little influence. Delegation risk identified in this study has the potential to undermine a number of common development policies, and is exacerbated by management practices frequently used by development organizations.

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Mexican migration flows and agricultural labor markets in the U.S.

Author(s)

Ashish Shenoy and Julian Arteaga

Publication Date

June 26, 2023

Using information on migratory flows for every Mexican municipality-US county pair throughout the 2006--2019 period, this paper estimates the effect that variations in Mexican migration flows have on U.S. agricultural labor-market outcomes. We instrument for migration-driven changes in local labor supply using a shift-share variable that combines Mexican municipality-level violence rates with preexisting migration network patterns. Our estimates show that, in the short run, decreasing migration rates induce agricultural firms to employ a larger number of indirectly-hired workers, to increase the number of H-2A seasonal worker visas requested, and to pay higher average wages to directly-hired farm workers.

Declining Mobility among Mexican-Born Workers in the US Labor Force

Author(s)

Julian Arteaga and Ashish Shenoy

Publication Date

June 19, 2023

Geographic mobility is a key component of labor supply elasticity. In this paper we document a reversal in the relative migration elasticity of Mexican-born workers in the U.S. In 2000–2010, Mexican immigrants’ choice of location within the U.S. was more responsive to local economic conditions than that of native-born Americans, with the gap expanding over the decade. This pattern subsequently reversed, and by 2020 native-born workers had a greater internal migration elasticity than their Mexican-born counterparts. This reversal is unique to immigrants of Mexican origin and not explained by the occupational or demographic composition of the Mexican-born labor force.

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Migration and Resilience during a Global Crisis

Author(s)

Ashish Shenoy with Nathan Barker, C. Austin Davis, Paula López-Peña, Harrison Mitchell, A. Mushfiq Mobarak, Karim Naguib, Maira Reimão, and Corey Vernot

Published in

European Economic Review

Publication Date

June 19, 2023

Abstract: This study explores the relationship between migration and household resilience during a global crisis that eliminated the option to migrate. We link prior data from four populations in Bangladesh and Nepal to new phone surveys conducted during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. While earnings fell universally, pandemic-induced declines were 14–25% greater among previously migration-dependent households and urban migrant workers, with household remittance losses far exceeding official statistics. Heightened economic exposure during the pandemic erased prior gains achieved by transnational migrants and caused fourfold greater prevalence of food insecurity among domestic subsistence migrants. Economic distress spilled over onto non-migrants in high-migration villages and labor markets. We show that migration contributed to economic contagion independent of its role in disease transmission. Losing the option to migrate differentially increased the vulnerability of migration-dependent households during a crisis.

Read more here.

Ashish Shenoy

Position Title Executive Committee Member

Ashish Shenoy's content

Abstract

Position Title

Executive Committee Member