Michael Clemens

Last updated
Michael A. Clemens
Nationality American
OccupationEconomist
Academic career
Institution George Mason University and Peterson Institute for International Economics
FieldInternational migration, economic development, economic history
Alma mater California Institute of Technology (B.S.)
Johns Hopkins University (M.S.)
Harvard (Ph.D.)
Doctoral
advisor
Jeffrey G. Williamson
Influences Lant Pritchett
Michael Kremer
Jeffrey G. Williamson
William Easterly
Alynn Young
Awards Royal Economic Society Prize
Information at IDEAS / RePEc
Website http://mclem.org

Michael Andrew Clemens (born 1972) is an American economist who studies international migration and global economic development.

Contents

He is a full professor in the Department of Economics at George Mason University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He is also affiliated with IZA, the Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany, the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College London, and is a Distinguished Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development.

Research

Michael Clemens (2nd from right) Michael Clemens.jpg
Michael Clemens (2nd from right)

Clemens' recent work focuses on the effects of international migration on people in their countries of destination, on people in their countries of origin, and on migrants themselves. One of his most-cited works on migration is Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2011. [1] In this paper, he investigates why economists spend much more time studying the movement of goods and capital and much less time studying the movement of people. He sketches a four-point research agenda on the effects of emigration. He has also studied the effects on the US labor market from the exclusion of Mexican bracero farmworkers at the end of 1964. [2]

Clemens has also written about aid effectiveness, including an article for the Journal of Development Effectiveness: "When does rigorous impact evaluation make a difference? The case of the Millennium Villages." [3] Using a high-profile case, the Millennium Villages Project, an experimental and intensive package intervention to spark economic development in rural Africa, he and his co-authors illustrate the benefits of rigorous impact evaluation by showing the estimates of the project's effects depend heavily in evaluation method. He also wrote Counting Chickens When They Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth for the Royal Economic Society's Economic Journal , examining the cross-country relationship between foreign aid and economic growth. [4]

Initiatives

Clemens conceived the idea of Global Skill Partnerships (GSPs), proposing them for the first time at the Global Economic Symposium in Rio de Janeiro in 2012. GSPs are a novel type of agreement between two countries to regulate the migration of skilled workers between them with benefits shared by both countries, [5] endorsed by 154 countries in the Global Compact for Migration. Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Clemens led an effort to make Haitians eligible for H-2A and H-2B low-skill temporary work visa program arguing that the economic impact of migration would be far more beneficial than any foreign assistance or aid to the country. [6]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human capital flight</span> Emigration of highly skilled or well-educated individuals

Human capital flight is the emigration or immigration of individuals who have received advanced training at home. The net benefits of human capital flight for the receiving country are sometimes referred to as a "brain gain" whereas the net costs for the sending country are sometimes referred to as a "brain drain". In occupations with a surplus of graduates, immigration of foreign-trained professionals can aggravate the underemployment of domestic graduates, whereas emigration from an area with a surplus of trained people leads to better opportunities for those remaining. But emigration may cause problems for the home country if the trained people are in short supply there.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bracero Program</span> 1942–1964 migrant worker program

The Bracero Program was a U.S. Government-sponsored program that imported Mexican farm and railroad workers into the United States between the years 1942 and 1964.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Development aid</span> Financial aid given to support the development of developing countries

Development aid is a type of foreign/international/overseas aid given by governments and other agencies to support the economic, environmental, social, and political development of developing countries. Closely related concepts include: developmental aid, development assistance, official development assistance, development policy, development cooperation and technical assistance. It is distinguished from humanitarian aid by aiming at a sustained improvement in the conditions in a developing country, rather than short-term relief. Development aid is thus widely seen as a major way to meet Sustainable Development Goal 1 for the developing nations.

Aid effectiveness is the degree of success or failure of international aid. Concern with aid effectiveness might be at a high level of generality, or it might be more detailed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Immigration</span> Movement of people into another country or region to which they are not native

Immigration is the international movement of people to a destination country of which they are not usual residents or where they do not possess nationality in order to settle as permanent residents. Commuters, tourists, and other short-term stays in a destination country do not fall under the definition of immigration or migration; seasonal labour immigration is sometimes included, however.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IZA Institute of Labor Economics</span> German think tank

The IZA - Institute of Labor Economics, until 2016 referred to as the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), is a private, independent economic research institute and academic network focused on the analysis of global labor markets and headquartered in Bonn, Germany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Kremer</span> American economist and Nobel laureate (born 1964)

Michael Robert Kremer is an American development economist currently serving as University Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and Director of the Development Innovation Lab at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. Kremer formerly served as the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University, a role he held from 2003 to 2020. In 2019, Kremer was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."

Various effects of migration have been an area of study and debate amongst economists. Researchers have studied questions including: if migrants hurt wages for natives; what is their tax contribution/burden; what are the effects of the money migrants send home (remittances); and how does the loss of workers affect the sender country.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Center for Global Development</span> American international development think tank

The Center for Global Development (CGD) is a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C., and London that focuses on international development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joshua Angrist</span> Israeli–American economist

Joshua David Angrist is an Israeli–American economist and Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Angrist, together with Guido Imbens, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2021 "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships".

The Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), earlier known as the Center of Evaluation for Global Action, is a research network based at the University of California that advances global health and development through impact evaluation and economic analysis. The Center's researchers use randomized controlled trials and other rigorous forms of evaluation to promote sustainable social and economic development around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Miguel</span> American economist

Edward "Ted" Andrew Miguel is the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics in the Department of Economics at University of California, Berkeley, US. He is the founder and faculty director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) at U.C. Berkeley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Autor</span> American economist

David H. Autor is an American economist, public policy scholar, and professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he also acts as co-director of the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative. Although Autor has contributed to a variety of fields in economics his research generally focuses on topics from labor economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pierre Cahuc</span> French economist

Pierre Cahuc is a French economist who currently works as Professor of Economics at Sciences Po. He is Program Director for the IZA Institute of Labor Economics's programme "Labour Markets" and research fellow at CEPR. His research focuses mainly on labour economics and its relationship with macroeconomics. In 2001, he was awarded the Prize of the Best Young Economist of France for his contributions to economic research. He belongs to the most highly cited economists in France and Europe's leading labour economists.

Hillel Rapoport is an economist at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne and Paris School of Economics. He specializes on the dynamics of migration and its impact on economic development as well as on the economics of immigration, diversity, and refugees' relocation and resettlement and ranks as one of the leading economists on the topic of migration.

Frédéric Docquier is a Belgian economist and Professor of Economics at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain). He ranks as one of the leading economists in the field of international migration, with a focus on brain drain and skilled migration.

Xin Meng is a Chinese economist and professor at the Research School of Economics, College of Business and Economics (CBE), Australian National University (ANU). She is also a member of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies, the American Economic Association, the Society of Labor Economics and Royal Economic Society. Her main research interests include Labour Economics, Development Economics, Applied Microeconomics and Economics of Education. She focuses on researching issues about the Chinese labour market during transition, the influence of corporations and gender discrimination, the economic assimilation of immigrants and the economic implications of major catastrophes. Meng was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2008.

Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes is a Spanish economist, a Professor in the Economics and Business Management faculty at the University of California, Merced and a Professor and Department Chair at San Diego State University. Since 2015, she has been the Western Representative for a standing committee called the Committee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP). Her field of work focuses on the fundamentals of labour economics and international migration, particularly the nature of immigration policies and its impact on migrant's assimilation into the community at a state and local level. Amuedo-Dorantes has published multiple articles in refereed journals including Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Population Economics, International Migration, and Journal of Development Economics.

Petra Elisabeth (Crockett) Todd is an American economist whose research interests include labor economics, development economics, microeconomics, and econometrics. She is the Edward J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and is also affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center, the Human Capital and Equal Opportunity Global Working Group (HCEO), the IZA Institute of Labor Economics and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Immigration to the United States has many effects on the culture and politics of the United States.

References

  1. Clemens, Michael A. (2011). "Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?". Journal of Economic Perspectives. 25 (3): 83–106. doi:10.1257/jep.25.3.83. S2CID   59507836.
  2. Clemens, Michael A.; Lewis, Ethan G.; Postel, Hannah M. (2018-06-01). "Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion". American Economic Review. 108 (6): 1468–1487. doi:10.1257/aer.20170765. ISSN   0002-8282. PMC   6040835 . PMID   30008480.
  3. Clemens, Michael A. (2011). "When Does Rigorous Impact Evaluation Make a Difference? The Case of the Millennium Villages" (PDF). Journal of Development Effectiveness. 3 (3): 305–339. doi:10.1080/19439342.2011.587017. hdl: 10986/13323 . S2CID   216137992.
  4. Clemens, Michael A. (2012). "Counting Chickens When They Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth". The Economic Journal. 122 (561): 590–617. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2011.02482.x.
  5. "Global Skill Partnerships". Center for Global Development, Washington, DC. Retrieved 2023-06-23.
  6. Clemens, Michael A.; Postel, Hannah. "Temporary work visas as US-Haiti development cooperation: a preliminary impact evaluation". IZA Journal of Labor & Development. 6 (1). doi: 10.1186/s40175-016-0070-x . hdl: 10419/169307 . ISSN   2193-9020.