Wilbur Townsend

A very professional looking headshot.

I'm a labor economist: I use theory and empirics to study how our wages are set, why we hold the jobs we do, and how government policy affects our working lives. My own job is "assistant professor" in the UC Berkeley economics department. I was raised in the Motueka, Wairarapa and Catlins regions of New Zealand.

My email address is on my CV. I don't respond to high schoolers wanting research experience. Sorry. I know cleaning my data may seem like an irreplacable source of joy, but there are other ways for a young person to have fun. Here are some ideas:

  1. Invent a musical instrument.
  2. Learn a language.
  3. Engage in risky behaviours.
    1. Hitch-hiking.
    2. Mushroom-foraging.
  4. Learn mathematics.
  5. Talk to strangers.
    1. On a bus.
    2. At a bar. (When I was 17 I had two strategies to avoid being carded: (a) find a dirty beer glass and ask "for a refill"; (b) adopt a strong, generically-European accent. ymmv.)
  6. Read the manifestos of long-defunct philosophical movements.
  7. Organize politically.
    1. Nothing racist please.

Working papers

How Restricting Migrants' Job Options Affects Both Migrants and Existing Residents (with Corey Allan).

Do restrictive work visas protect existing residents' wages? We study New Zealand's 'Essential Skills' visa, which required migrants work only for firms that could not recruit New Zealanders. Loosening a single migrant's restrictions does not affect their wages. However, loosening the restrictions on all an occupation's migrants does increase wages. These results are consistent with a wage-posting model where each firm pays migrants and residents equally. We estimate such a model. The restrictions decreased migrants' average wage by 5.6%. Though most residents were unaffected, 2.5% had their wage decreased by more than 2%.

Job Matching without Price Discrimination (with Jesse Silbert), R&R, Games and Economic Behavior.

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.

A Novel Algorithm for Drawing Nested Extreme Value Random Variables, Conditionally accepted, Journal of Choice Modelling.

This paper presents an algorithm for drawing nested extreme value random variables — i.e., the variable used in the latent variable formulation of the nested logit model. Runtime is linear in both the number of alternatives and the number of nests. An R package, nev, implements the algorithm.

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.