Person:
Özden, Çağlar

Development Research Group

Fields of Specialization

Financial Infrastructure and Remittances, Trade, Migration

Departments

Development Research Group

Last updated February 1, 2023

Biography

A Turkish national and a professional migrant, Caglar received his undergraduate degrees in economics and industrial engineering from Cornell University and Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. He is a fellow of IZA, CreAM and ERF. His research explores the nexus of globalization of product and labor markets, government policies and economic development. He has edited three books and published numerous papers in leading academic journals such as American Economic Review and the Economic Journal. His current research projects explore the determinants and patterns of global labor mobility, impacts of migrants on the destination labor market outcomes, linkages between migration, trade, and foreign direct investment flows, medical brain drain and linkages between ageing and global economic integration.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 45

Price Effects of Preferential Market Access: The Caribbean Basin Initiative and the Apparel Sector

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-02) Özden, Çaglar ; Sharma, Gunjan

Preferential trade arrangements should be evaluated by analyzing their effect on prices, rather than the total value of trade, as emphasized in the theoretical literature but rarely implemented empirically. The authors analyze the impact of the unilateral preferences granted by the U.S. Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) on the prices received by eligible apparel exporters. They use fixed effects generalized least squares (GLS) estimation to isolate the effects of various other factors (such as quality, exchange rates, and transactions costs) and identify the effects of tariff preferences. The authors find that CBI exporters only capture around two-thirds of their preference margin, despite the fairly competitive nature of the apparel market. This translates into a 9 percent increase in the relative prices they receive, but these numbers vary across countries and years. Countries specializing in higher-value items capture more of the preference margin while implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement has a negative effect. The authors analyze the effect of Multi-Fibre Agreement (MFA) quotas imposed on third countries (such as China) and find that the benefits of CBI preferences will be significantly reduced once the quotas are fully removed in 2005.
Loss Aversion and Trade Policy

(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-09) Freund, Caroline ; Özden, Çağlar

This paper provides new survey evidence showing that loss aversion and reference dependence are important in shaping people's perception of trade policy. Under the assumption that agents' welfare functions exhibit these behavioral elements, we analyze a model with a welfare-maximizing government and with the lobbying framework of Grossman and Helpman (1994). The policy implications of the augmented models differ in three important ways. One, there is a region of compensating protection, where a decline in the world price leads to an offsetting increase in protection, such that a constant domestic price is maintained. Two, protection following a single negative price shock will be persistent. Three, irrespective of the extent of lobbying, there will be a deviation from free trade that tends to favor loss-making industries. The augmented models are more consistent with the observed structure of protection, and in particular, explain why many trade policy instruments are explicitly designed to maintain prices at a given level.
The Perversity of Preferences : The Generalized System of Preferences and Developing Country Trade Policies, 1976-2000

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-01) Ozden, Caglar ; Reinhardt, Eric

Industrial countries maintain special tariff preferences, namely the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), for imports from developing countries. Critics have highlighted the underachieving nature of such preferences, but developing countries continue to place the GSP at the heart of their agenda in multilateral negotiations. What effect do such preferences have on a recipient's own trade policies? The authors develop and test a simple theoretical model of a small country's trade policy choice, using a dataset of 154 developing countries from 1976 through 2000. They find that countries removed from the GSP adopt more liberal trade policies than those remaining eligible. The results, corrected for endogeneity and robust to numerous alternative measures of trade policy, suggest that developing countries may be best served by full integration into the reciprocity-based world trade regime rather than continued GSP-style special preferences.
A Global Assessment of Human Capital Mobility : The Role of Non-OECD Destinations

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-05) Artuc, Erhan ; Docquier, Frederic ; Ozden, Caglar ; Parsons, Christopher

Discussions of high-skilled mobility typically evoke migration patterns from poorer to wealthier countries, which ignore movements to and between developing countries. This paper presents, for the first time, a global overview of human capital mobility through bilateral migration stocks by gender and education in 1990 and 2000, and calculation of nuanced brain drain indicators. Building on newly collated data, the paper uses a novel estimation procedure based on a pseudo-gravity model, then identifies key determinants of international migration, and subsequently uses estimated parameters to impute missing data. Non-OECD destinations account for one-third of skilled-migration, while OECD destinations are declining in relative importance.
Price Effects of Preferential Market Access : Caribbean Basin Initiative and the Apparel Sector

(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2006-05-01) Özden, Çaglar ; Sharma, Gunjan

Preferential trade arrangements should be evaluated by their effect on prices rather than by their effect on the total value of trade. This point is emphasized in the theoretical literature but rarely implemented empirically. This article analyzes the U.S. Caribbean Basin Initiative's (CBI's) impact on the prices received by eligible apparel exporters. The CBI's apparel preferences are the most important and heavily used unilateral preferences because of high trade barriers imposed on exports from the rest of the world. A fixed effect generalized least squares (GLS) estimation is used to isolate the effects of other factors (such as quality, exchange rates, and transaction costs) and to identify the effects of tariff preferences. CBI exporters capture only about two-thirds of their preference margin despite the high degree of competition among importers. This translates into a 9 percent increase in the relative prices they receive, with some variance across countries and years. Countries specializing in higher value items capture more of the preference margin, and the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has a negative effect. Removing multifibre arrangement quotas significantly lowers the benefits of CBI preferences.
Immigrant versus Natives? Displacement and Job Creation

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06) Ozden, Caglar ; Wagner, Mathis

The impact of immigration on native workers is driven by two countervailing forces: the degree of substitutability between natives and immigrants, and the increased demand for native workers as immigrants reduce the cost of production and output expands. The literature so far has focused on the former substitution effect, while ignoring the latter scale effect. This paper estimates both of these effects using labor force survey data from Malaysia (1990-2010), a country uniquely suited for understanding the impact of low-skilled immigration. The instrumental variable estimates imply that the elasticity of labor demand (3.4) is greater than the elasticity of substitution between natives and immigrants (2.5). On average the scale effect outweighs the substitution effect. For every ten additional immigrants, employment of native workers increases by 4.1 in a local labor market. These large reallocation effects are accompanied by negligible relative wage changes. At the national level, a 10 percent increase in immigrants, equivalent to 1 percent increase in labor force, has a small positive effect on native wages (0.14 percent). The impact of immigration is highly heterogeneous for natives with different levels of education, resulting in substantial changes in skill premiums and hence inequality. Immigrants on net displace natives with at most primary education; while primarily benefiting those with a little more education, lower secondary or completed secondary education.
Informing Migration Policies : A Data Primer

(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-11) Carletto, Calogero ; Larrison, Jennica ; Ozden, Caglar

Researchers in many fields, such as demography, economics, and sociology, have established various data collection methodologies and principles to answer a range of academic and policy questions on migration. Although the progress has been impressive, some basic challenges remain. This paper addresses some basic, yet fundamental, questions on identification of international migrants and how their various demographic, personal, and human capital characteristics are captured via different data sources. The critical issues are the construction of proper sampling frames in censuses, registers, and surveys and the design of questionnaires in household, labor market, and other relevant surveys. The paper discusses how these data sources can be used to answer policy questions in areas such as labor markets, education, or poverty. The focus is on how some of the existing shortcomings in availability, quality, and relevance of migration data can be overcome via improvements in data collection methods.
Brain Waste? Educated Immigrants in the US Labor Market

( 2008) Mattoo, Aaditya ; Neagu, Ileana Cristina ; Ozden, Caglar

This paper investigates the occupational placement of immigrants in the US labor market using census data. We find striking differences among highly educated immigrants from different countries, even after we control for individuals' age, experience, and level of education. With some exceptions, educated immigrants from Latin American and Eastern European countries are more likely to end up in unskilled jobs than immigrants from Asia and industrial countries. A large part of the variation can be explained by attributes of the country of origin that influence the quality of human capital, such as expenditure on tertiary education and the use of English as a medium of instruction. These findings suggest that "underplaced" migrants suffer primarily from low (or poorly transferable) skills rather than skill underutilization. The selection effects of US immigration policy also play an important role in explaining cross-country variation. The observed under-placement of educated migrants might be alleviated if home and host countries cooperate by sharing information on labor market conditions and work toward the recognition of qualifications.
A Global Assessment of Human Capital Mobility : The Role of Non-OECD Destinations

(Elsevier, 2015-01) Artuc, Erhan ; Docquier, Frédéric ; Özden, Çaglar ; Parsons, Christopher

Discussions of high-skilled mobility typically evoke migration patterns from poorer to wealthier countries, which ignore movements to and between developing countries. This paper presents, for the first time, a global overview of human capital mobility through bilateral migration stocks by gender and education in 1990 and 2000, and calculation of nuanced brain drain indicators. Building on newly collated data, we use a novel estimation procedure based on a pseudo-gravity model. We identify key determinants of international migration, which we subsequently use to impute missing data. Non-OECD destinations account for one-third of skilled-migration, while OECD destinations are declining in relative importance.
Physician Emigration from Sub-Saharan Africa to the United States: Analysis of the 2011 AMA Physician Masterfile

(Public Library of Science, 2013-09-17) Siankam Tankwanchi, Akhenaten Benjamin ; Ozden, Caglar ; Vermund, Sten H.

The large-scale emigration of physicians from sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to high-income nations is a serious development concern. Our objective was to determine current emigration trends of SSA physicians found in the physician workforce of the United States. We analyzed physician data from the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Health Workforce Statistics along with graduation and residency data from the 2011 American Medical Association Physician Masterfile (AMA-PM) on physicians trained or born in SSA countries who currently practice in the US. We estimated emigration proportions, year of US entry, years of practice before emigration, and length of time in the US.