Wilbur Townsend
I am a labor economist from New Zealand. I am currently a doctoral student at Harvard University, where my research focusses on wage-setting, inequality and immigration. I was raised in Motueka, the Wairarapa and the Catlins.
Working papers
How Restricting Migrants' Job Options Affects Both Migrants and Existing Residents (with Corey Allan).
Governments often restrict international migrants' job options. This paper shows that these restrictions can hurt not only migrants but also the existing residents whom they aim to protect. We study New Zealand’s ‘Essential Skills’ work visa, which was New Zealand's main work visa between 2008 and 2022. Essential Skills migrants could only work for firms which could not find New Zealanders. Loosening restrictions for a single individual has no impact on their wages: migrants who win an unrestricted resident visa through a lottery switch jobs more frequently, but receive no gain in wages. However, when the Essential Skills job restrictions were loosened for all migrants in an occupation, both job-switching and wages typically grew. These results are consistent with a wage-posting model in which each firm pays migrants and residents equally; in such a model, the wage received by each worker will not depend directly on her own outside option but rather on the distribution of outside options among her colleagues. We estimate a wage-posting model, and compare equilibrium wages under the Essential Skills job restrictions to a counterfactual simulation in which migrants’ job options are unrestricted. The restrictions decreased migrants' average wage by 8%. Although most residents were unaffected by the restrictions, 2.1% had their wage decreased by more than 2%. The restrictions increased profits, especially in firms which employed many migrants. The restrictions decreased annual welfare by $292m NZD — 30% of migrants' earnings — largely because migrants could not move to firms which they preferred for non-pecuniary reasons.
Job Matching without Price Discrimination (with Jesse Silbert).
We construct a job matching model to study a labor market in which firms do not price discriminate among their workers. While an efficient stable outcome always exists, inefficient outcomes can be stable as well. Workers’ preferred stable outcome is efficient. Firms prefer inefficient stable outcomes in which they pay lower salaries.
Work in progress
Why Some Workers Earn More Than Others (with Jesse Silbert).
We document substantial earnings inequality between workers in the same firm and (narrowly-defined) occupation. We then ask whether this wage inequality reflects variation in firms' willingness to pay by tracking how a firm's profits are affected by a worker's separation. Though firms have greater willingness to pay for better-paid workers, we find no relationship between residual wages and value-add.
Can Market Power Explain the Gender Wage Gap? (with Savannah Noray).
Women tend to earn less than men in the same occupation. Women also tend to work in lower-paying occupations. We present a unified model of both the within-occupation and the between-occupation gender wage gaps. In a calibration exercise, employers' market power explains 90% of the within-occupation wage gap and all of the between-occupation wage gap.
Publications
Social Capital I: Measurement and Associations with Economic Mobility (with Raj Chetty, Matthew O. Jackson, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel et al.), Nature, 608(7921), 2022.
Social Capital II: Determinants of Economic Connectedness (with Raj Chetty, Matthew O. Jackson, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel et al.), Nature, 608(7921), 2022.
Earnings Dynamics and Measurement Error in Matched Survey and Administrative Data (with Dean Hyslop), Journal of Business & Economics Statistics, 138(2), 2020.
Joint Culpability: The Impact of Medical Marijuana Laws on Crime (with Luke Chu), Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 159, 2019.
Effects of (Ultra-Fast) Fibre Broadband on Student Achievement (with Arthur Grimes), Information Economics and Policy, 44, 2018.
Ethnic and Economic Determinants of Migrant Location Choice (with Arthur Grimes and Cindy Smart), in New Frontiers in Inter-Regional Migration Research (eds.: Biagi, B., Faggian, A. & Rajbhandari, I), 2018.
The Longer Term Impacts of Job Displacement on Labour Market Outcomes (with Dean Hyslop), The Australian Economic Review, 2018.
Employment Misclassification in Survey and Administrative Reports (with Dean Hyslop), Economics Letters, 155, 2017.