Neighborhood Effects among Migrants: Evidence from Bangkok, Thailand

Sakiko Tanabe, IBM Solutions and Yokohama National University
Futoshi Yamauchi, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Yokohama National University

This paper examines non-nonmarket interactions among migrants in an urban labor market, Bangkok, Thailand, that has experienced large-scale inflows of migrants from rural areas. We test whether or not the labor-market performance of previous migrants has externalities to that of new migrants that who moved from the same origin provinces. Though it has been increasingly argued in theoretical literature that non-nonmarket interactions of agents play important roles in activities such as job search and human capital formation, empirical evidence is still weak. Our empirical results, which control origin fixed-effects, are two-fold: (1)the relative size of the migrants population in the market positively affects employment probabilities of new migrants, and (2)the employment probabilities of previous migrants also raise those of new migrants. Finally, to quantify the non-nonmarket interactions, we simulate the magnitude of the externalities.