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

Where on Earth is Everybody? The Evolution of Global Bilateral Migration 1960–2000

(World Bank, 2011-01-30) Özden, Çağlar ; Parsons, Christopher R. ; Schiff, Maurice ; Walmsley, Terrie L.

Global matrices of bilateral migrant stocks spanning 1960–2000 are presented, disaggregated by gender and based primarily on the foreign-born definition of migrants. More than one thousand census and population register records are combined to construct decennial matrices corresponding to the five census rounds between 1960 and 2000. For the first time, a comprehensive picture of bilateral global migration over the second half of the 20th century emerges. The data reveal that the global migrant stock increased from 92 million in 1960 to 165 million in 2000. Quantitatively, migration between developing countries dominates, constituting half of all international migration in 2000. When the partition of India and the dissolution of the Soviet Union are accounted for, migration between developing countries is remarkably stable over the period. Migration from developing to developed countries is the fastest growing component of international migration in both absolute and relative terms. The United States has remained the most important migrant destination in the world, home to one fifth of the world's migrants and the top destination for migrants from some 60 sending countries. Migration to Western Europe has come largely from elsewhere in Europe. The oil-rich Persian Gulf countries emerge as important destinations for migrants from the Middle East and North Africa and South and Southeast Asia. Finally, although the global migrant stock is predominantly male, the proportion of female migrants increased noticeably between 1960 and 2000. The number of women rose in every region except South Asia.
Five Questions on International Migration and Development

(World Bank, 2011-01-30) Özden, Çağlar ; Rapoport, Hillel ; Schiff, Maurice

The movement of people in search of better economic conditions and a more secure environment is as old as human history. Such movements not only profoundly affect the lives of the migrants, but also lead to significant economic and social transformations in migrants' countries of origin and destination. In recent years, a significant increase in the growth of international migration and remittance flows and in awareness of their development impact has led to a resurgence of interest by academics, policymakers, and analysts in what has been referred to as the third leg of globalization (the other two being international trade and international capital flows). The renewed interest in international migration led the World Bank Development Research Group to initiate the Research Program on International Migration and Development in 2003. More recently, the Research Department of the Agence française de Développement (AFD) and the World Bank Development Research Group have collaborated on several research projects and conferences. This symposium issue gathers some of the papers presented at the Second International Migration and Development Conference, held at the World Bank in Washington, DC, on September 10–11, 2009. The success of the conference series and the commitment of the World Bank and AFD to sponsoring the conferences reflect the recognition by international development agencies and the academic community of the importance of international migration to the development agenda. The five articles in this symposium issue fall into two groups. A first group of three articles deal with the measurement, determinants, and political effects of international migration. A new global bilateral migration database for 1960–2000 ( Özden and others 2011) updates and extends the Parsons and others (2007) database back to 1960.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trade Preferences and Differential Treatment of Developing Countries: A Selective Survey

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-04) Hoekman, Bernard ; Özden, Çaglar

Nonreciprocal trade preferences and provisions in the GATT/WTO that allow developing countries greater leeway to retain or use protectionist policies are two of the central planks of so-called special and differential treatment (SDT) for developing countries in the multilateral trading system. The authors survey the literature on the rationales, institutional features, and economic effectiveness of SDT. A large literature has emerged on SDT in the past 50 years, by both proponents and opponents. They summarize a number of key contributions on the subject, with a special emphasis on the evaluation of the impact of SDT, especially preferential market access. The issue of SDT has become very topical again, following a period during which it was viewed as an outdated concept for the multilateral trading system. The authors therefore devote attention as well to a number of recent contributions that discuss (1) whether there is a continued need for SDT, and (2) how this might be designed from both a development (recipient) objective and from the perspective of the trading system more generally. A major theme of the survey is that most of the issues that are debated today were already being discussed in the 1960s. The authors conclude that those who questioned the value of unilateral preferences have proven to be prescient.
Migration and Remittances: Causes and Linkages

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-12) Niimi, Yoko ; Özden, Çağlar

The authors empirically examine the determinants of remittance flows at the cross-country level. They consider, among other things, the significance of the level of migration, the education level of migrants, and financial sector development in determining remittances. Given the potential endogeneity problems, the migration and financial development variables are instrumented in the estimation. They find that the migration level is the main driver of remittance flows, even after controlling for the endogeneity bias through instrumental variable estimation. The authors also find that the education level of migrants relative to the population in home countries, the size of the economy, and the level of economic development of recipient countries adversely affect remittance flows. While they find the effect of financial sector development to be positive, its significance is not strongly supported in their analysis.
Migrant Networks and Foreign Direct Investment

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-11) Javorcik, Beata S. ; Özden, Çağlar ; Spatareanu, Mariana ; Neagu, Cristina

While there exists sizeable literature documenting the importance of ethnic networks for international trade, little attention has been devoted to studying the effects of networks on foreign direct investment (FDI). The existence of ethnic networks may positively affect FDI by promoting information flows across international borders and by serving as a contract enforcement mechanism. This paper investigates the link between the presence of migrants in the United States and U.S. FDI in the migrants' countries of origin, taking into account the potential endogeneity concerns. The results suggest that U.S. FDI abroad is positively correlated with the presence of migrants from the host country. The data further indicate that the relationship between FDI and migration is driven by the presence of migrants with a college education.