Labor and migration research: Insights from India and Zambia

In addition to these two awardees for our 2022 research grant, SurveyCTO awarded partial grants to 10 additional researchers. In this webinar, we feature two researchers from that cohort: Nicholas Swanson and Shashwat Dhar. Nicholas and Shashwat will present on labor and migration related research they have completed using SurveyCTO.

Nicholas’s project is called “Kinship Pressure and Firm-Worker Matching Distortions.” In this study, he conducts a field experiment with small business owners in Zambia to determine why many of them choose to employ relatives. While the common understanding is this decision reflects information asymmetries or contracting frictions in the labor market, Nicholas hypothesizes that some of this hiring may be driven by social norms, or social pressure to hire from one’s kinship network. 

Shashwat’s research project, “Political Brain-drain or Brain-gain? Labor Migration and Citizenship in Rural India,” examines how exposure to life outside the village that comes with greater labor mobility affects the political attitudes and behaviors of those who stay behind. His goal is to advance the understanding of how labor migration and the political, financial, and social remittances that come with it can affect the nature of citizen-state interactions downstream in remote and underserved rural communities.

In this webinar, Nicholas and Shashwat present findings from these projects, explaining how they used SurveyCTO to meet their data collection needs and make an impact.

Come learn from two outstanding early-career researchers and be inspired in this webinar!