Yesterday I went to a lunchtime talk by my good friend and PSE colleague Katia Zhuravskaya. She is one of the main reasons we decided to visit PSE. (I managed to clandestinely take the poorly-exposed and pixilated photo above during the talk---I was too embarrassed to ask Katia to pose for my blog.)
First a bit of background and then I'll get to her talk.
I met Katia 14 years ago when we were both on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. At the time, she and her husband Sergei were both rising stars in Russia among the ranks of academic economists. Her husband also had substantial policy interests and was well on his way to becoming an important policy adviser in democratic Russia. They had one small baby with another on the way. Kate was a newborn then. So Katia and I had a lot to talk about, both being women economists on sabbatical at the IAS with small children. We also both had artist parents, her father being an iconographer (not sure if that's a word---he was a maker of icons) in Russia. We had lunch together almost every day, and I grew to cherish our conversations and friendship.
We kept in touch in the intervening 14 years, seeing each other at the occasional conference or exchanging emails, and I also followed the fortunes of her family through the pages of The New York Times and The New Yorker---more on that in a few minutes. I was so excited to be able to renew my friendship with Katia here in Paris and meet her now almost-grown children. And, as anticipated, it has been wonderful, a highlight being a party that she and Sergei threw for us and some other visitors soon after our arrival.
Her talk yesterday was very interesting, based on a research project she has with three coauthors that is a real tour de force in empirical political economy. Broadly speaking, they are interested in the effects of migration on investment of different types, real assets, financial assets, human capital, etc. Obviously, investments in real, immobile assets like land and buildings might be sold for a loss or lost entirely in the event of a migration. Other assets might be more mobile, harder to expropriate, or both. Jews, for instance, lost homes and businesses when forced to flee Europe during Nazism but could often take small, mobile assets like jewelry. Sometimes they would have access to financial assets, depending on where they had been invested. And then, of course, their human capital came with them and, depending on factors like language, licensure, and institutions, might be fruitfully used in the new location. How, she wondered, would these kinds of migratory experiences affect migrants' investment decisions and the fortunes of the generations below them?
As an empirical setting, they used the forced migration of Poles from Kresy into parts of Germany that were annexed by Poland after WWII. (Since this is not meant to be a technical blog, I will omit details of how they dealt with extremely challenging issues of identification, sample selection, isolating treatment effects, and so forth. It was, however, very carefully executed and well-crafted.) The main finding was that forced migrants invested significantly more in their human capital, in other words, received significantly higher levels of education, post migration, relative to both voluntary migrants and Poles who did not migrate. The ones forced to migrate, they argued, received a strong and salient message of the importance of investing in an asset that is mobile and cannot be expropriated, one's mind. And that message was passed down to their descendants as well, either directly through family stories or indirectly through the effects of a previous emphasis on education.
Economists often take their own experiences as inspiration for their research. (It is not a coincidence that all three of our daughters have been very interested in math and Glenn has done research on gender issues in math education.) At yesterday's talk, I could not help notice echos of Katia's family's own personal experiences throughout the talk. As I said, 14 years ago, Sergei was gaining prominence in Russia as an economic policy expert. He was also seen as incorruptible and willing to speak truth to power. His popularity and high public profile protected him for a while, even if his opinions might sometimes be unwelcome by a government in which Putin was steadily consolidating power. Katia was concerned, though. She applied for jobs abroad and received an offer from PSE. She relocated their main home to Paris, moving the children to French schools. Sergei commuted every week, speaking honestly about Russian government corruption during the week and spending weekends in Paris with his family. This arrangement worked well for all concerned, except, apparently, Vladimir Putin. One day, a good friend of Sergei's in Putin's inner circle took Sergei aside. "You are no longer safe here." Later that day, he boarded a flight, leaving behind extended family, a home, a car, and many other belongings in Moscow, to join his family permanently in Paris. Katia and Sergei, of course, armed with substantial human capital, have continued to do important work in economic research and policy after their relocation to Paris.
I have glossed over some details of their story. You can read more at the link below.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/losing-sergei-guriev
Finally, I was so pleased to hear of Katia's latest honor. She won the prestigious Birgid Grodal Award from the European Economic Association given biennially to the Europe-based woman economist who has made the most significant contributions. She is, well, amazing.
https://www.eeassoc.org/index.php?site=&page=211&trsz=23
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