My primary research interest lies in International Trade, Open Economy Macroeconomics, Network Economics, Development Economics and Applied Econometrics. You can find my research statement in here.
Publications
1. The Empirics of Long-Term Brazilian Interest Rates, (with Tanweer Akram), PLoS ONE, 16(9),(2021) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257313.
2. Daily Exchange Rate Pass-Through into Micro Prices (with Renzo M Alvarez, Amin Shoja, and Hakan Yilmazkuday), Applied Economics Letters, 2018, DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2018.1486972
3. Remittances and Poverty in Bangladesh: Some Econometric Exercise (with Selim Raihan) Bangladesh Economic Outlook, Vol 2 & No 4 (2010)
2. Daily Exchange Rate Pass-Through into Micro Prices (with Renzo M Alvarez, Amin Shoja, and Hakan Yilmazkuday), Applied Economics Letters, 2018, DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2018.1486972
3. Remittances and Poverty in Bangladesh: Some Econometric Exercise (with Selim Raihan) Bangladesh Economic Outlook, Vol 2 & No 4 (2010)
Book Chapter
- Bangladesh: Migration, Remittances and Development (with Selim Raihan) in "Migration, Remittances and Development in South Asia", Edited by Saman Kelegama, published by SAGE publications Pvt, India (2011).
Published Policy Reports
- Bangladesh Country Paper: Employment Effects of Different Development Policy Instruments (with Selim Raihan, Bazlul Haque Khondker, Farazi Binti Ferdous), Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development, Working paper -- 2015/5.
- Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model for Bangladesh (with Selim Raihan and Bazlul H. Khondker). This working paper was done in collaboration with the Central bank of Bangladesh (2013)
- Assessing Price Volatility of Selected Essential Commodities in Bangladesh (with Selim Raihan, and Bazlul Haque Khondker), A report prepared for the Ministry of Commerce, Government of Bangladesh (2011)
Working Paper
Value-added Trade, Exchange Rate Pass-Through, and Trade Elasticity: Revisiting Trade Competitiveness [Job Market Paper] [Under Review]
How is exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) measures affected by increasing participation in global value chains? This paper measures ERPT for value-added trade, where intermediate inputs are shared among countries in a back-and-forth manner for producing a single final product. Estimation of pass-through was done using World Input-Output Database (WIOD), World Economic Outlook (WEO), and OECD statistics. Empirically estimated findings suggest that ignoring the value-added trade will cause a systematic upward bias in the estimation of ERPT. From empirical investigation, it is also evident that there exists substantial heterogeneity in pass-through rates across sectors: sectors with high-integration into global market functions with a lower rate of exchange in comparison to sectors with less integration.
Immigration and Trade: Extensive versus Intensive Margins Across Skill and Product Quality, (with Ahmed Tariq Aziz) [Under Review] [Job Market Paper]
This paper studies the impact of immigrants on the extensive and intensive margins of US exports. This analysis contributes to the literature by exploring variations in the effect across different skill groups of immigrants and product quality levels. Since a significant portion of immigrant populations suffers from poor skill transferability in the destination country, occupation in the destination country may contain more information about their role in enhancing trade. This paper proposes a more carefully defined measure of migration business networks based on the types of occupational scores and quantifies its impact on US export. Since the direction of causality in immigration-trade literature is less clearly established from earlier studies, this study instrumented the current migration stock with imputed flow and stock of migrants proportional to migrants’ initial distribution to establish the causal relationship. For the empirical estimation, this study utilizes the US Census Bureau state-level trade data provided by Schott (2004) and the IPUMS-America for immigration from a specific country to a particular state. Findings from this paper show that immigrant stock in the US has a significant effect on the US exports’ extensive and intensive margins. The intensive margin impact is higher for high-quality products, while in the case of extensive margin, the effect is higher for low-quality products. We find that in the case of both aggregate export and intensive margin, high-skilled immigrants trigger more high-quality trade compared to their counterparts and vice versa. However, with the recent surge in high-skilled immigrants coming from low-income countries, both skill groups show a stronger network effect for low-quality products on the extensive margin.
Immigration and International Trade: Cross-country Evidence (with Ahmed Tariq Aziz) [Under Submission]
This paper examines the impact of immigration on bilateral trade using a panel dataset of exports from 18 top migrant destinations (countries) to 69 top emigrant sources (countries) over five decades. Using various specifications of the gravity equation, we find that immigrants’ ethnic network contributes positively to exports, though the impact is much smaller than reported previously. Using a matching gravity framework, we explore the possibility of an indirect negative impact of immigration on bilateral trade. Though our estimation provides evidence of only a small direct positive impact of immigration on exports, we find the impact is much more important for a subset of countries. Our paper also provides evidence that immigration-trade links vary across product types.
Ethnic Network, Risk attitudes and Migration Decision: Empirical Evidence from the United States (with Tamanna Rimi & Ahmed Tariq Aziz) [Under Submission]
This paper examines the impact of risk attitudes on migration decision. we use the “Two Sample Two-Stage Instrumental Variable (TS2SIV)” technique to measure relative risk aversion and its impact on migration. Using the probit model, we find that more risk averse people are less likely to migrate. The results also indicate that the impact of risk attitude on migration varies by other demographic characteristics such as age, sex etc. In addition, we test whether there is any network effect on migration and how risk attitudes vary with network effect. We consider two ethnic groups; Asian and Hispanic, and find that the size of one’s own ethnic group in a source location has significant effect on the migration decisions. In addition, we also find the evidence that risk attitudes vary with network effect.
The Empirics of Long-Term Interest Rates on Mexican Government Bonds, (with Tanweer Akram)
Work In Progress
- Markups, Firm Location, and Pricing Strategy (with Hakan Yilmazkuday)
- Domestic Shock Propagation into International Demand for Bangladeshi Apparel Products
- Economic Policy Uncertainty and Macroeconomy: A Cross-Country Analysis
- Political Strikes and Stock returns
- Domestic Shock Propagation into International Demand for Bangladeshi Apparel Products
- Are Children Normal or Inferior Goods? (with Tonmoy Islam).
- Sectoral exposure of financial markets to oil risk factors in oil-rich countries,
- Understanding Causality in Interest Rates in Brazil, with (Tanweer Akram)