Essays on Inequality and Migration : a Post-Colonial and Global Perspective

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This thesis focuses on the intricate link between inequality, migration, and colonization. Chapter 1 looks at the causal effect of naturalization on the labor market integration of foreigners. It is acknowledged that better integration is beneficial for both migrants and the host country. In this respect, granting citizenship could be an important policy to boost migrants’ integration. In this chapter, I estimate the causal impact of obtaining citizenship on migrants’ labor market integration. I exploit a change in the law of naturalization through marriage in France in 2006. This reform amended the eligibility criteria for applicants by increasing the required number of years of marital life from 2 to 4, generating an exogenous shock and thus a quasi-experimental setting. Using administrative panel data, and a difference-in-differences approach, I estimate the labor market returns to naturalization. I find that, among those working, citizenship leads to an increase in annual earnings. While the gain in earnings is similar for both men and women, the effect for men is mostly driven by an increase in hours worked compared to an increase in hourly wages for women. I provide suggestive evidence that naturalization helps reduce informality and discrimination. This chapter thus provides strong evidence that naturalization acts as a catalyst for labor market integration. Chapter 2 studies the post-colonial trends of income inequality in four ex-French colonies. Most ex-colonies have gained their independence during the decolonization wave in the last century. Recent research on the colonial legacy in terms of inequality has thus mostly focused on these independent states, overlooking the few territories which were assimilated by their ex-colonizers. This chapter analyzes the post-colonial inequality in four such territories- La Reunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyane. Drawing on a new income tax dataset put together in this chapter, I study the evolution of income inequality since their decolonization in 1946 until recent years. The results of the top 1% income share a rapid decline of inequality since decolonization and stabilization in the recent decade. Despite the general catch-up of the overseas departments, the top 10% income share remained consistently higher than in the metropolis. Going further, I investigate the hidden underlying cleavage: the metropolitan-native divide. Using administrative data, I show that metropolitans are over-represented at the top of the distribution and that there exists a “metropolitan income premium” in the overseas departments, even after controlling for observable characteristics. Chapter 3 is joint work with Luis Bauluz, Filip Novokmet, and Daniel Sanchez Ordonez. It aims at measuring land inequality in a large variety of countries across different regions. It is known that agricultural land is vital for three out of four of the poorest billion individuals in the world yet little is known about its distribution. Existing cross-country estimates of land inequality, based on agriculture census data, measure the size distribution of agricultural holdings. These neither reflect land ownership inequality nor value inequality and often do not account for the landless population. In this chapter, we tackle these issues and provide novel and consistent estimates of land inequality across countries, based on household surveys. We show that i) land-value inequality can differ significantly from land-area inequality, ii) differences in the proportion of landless across countries vary substantially, affecting markedly inequality estimates and, iii) regional patterns in inequality according to our benchmark metric contradict existing estimates from agricultural censuses. Overall, South Asia and Latin America exhibit the highest inequality with top 10% landowners capturing up to 75% of agricultural land, followed by Africa and ‘Communist’ Asia (China and Vietnam) at levels around 55-60%.