Third Annual Kotak Lecture - Incite at Columbia University

Kotak Lecture to feature Jagdish Bhagwati and Harriet Duleep on immigration and admissions of Indian Americans

Sixth Annual Kotak Family Distinguished Lecture Series\

School of International and Public Affairs, Room 1501

Columbia University, 420 W 118th Street

Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Reception, 4:30 pm - 5:15 pm | Lecture and Panel, 5:15pm - 7:30pm

Presided by Professor Jagdish Bhagwati.

Harriet Duleep, College of William and Mary

"The Post-1965 Immigrants: Blessing or Bane?”

Pravin Krishna, Johns Hopkins

&

Jagdish Bhagwati, University Professor at Columbia University

"Why the Supreme Court Case on Discrimination Against

Admission of Indian Americans Gets it Wrong"

Closing Remarks by Arvind Panagariya

———

About Harriet Duleep:

Harriet Duleep is a Research Professor of Public Policy with William and Mary’s Public Policy program. She received her doctorate in economics from MIT. Her main areas of research are immigration, the socioeconomic determinants of mortality, minority economic status, discrimination, and women’s labor force behavior.

In immigration, she helped develop two models of immigrant economic assimilation. The crux of the Immigrant Human Capital Investment (IHCI) model, developed with Mark Regets, is that imported human capital, particularly with immigrants from economically developing countries, is more valuable in learning than in earning. The model predicts that, controlling for level of human capital, there will be an inverse relationship between immigrant entry earnings and subsequent earnings growth (see IZA discussion paper The Elusive Concept of Immigrant Quality: Evidence from 1970-1990 ). A synopsis of research related to this model, including its implications for earnings convergence among immigrants entering under different admission criteria and from different source countries, is in the May 1999 issue of the American Economic Review. Longitudinal Social Security administrative records matched to survey data confirm the high earnings growth of the post-1965 immigrants. (See “Measuring Immigrant Wage Growth Using Matched CPS Files” Demography, May 1997 and “Insights from Longitudinal Data on the Earnings Growth of U.S. Foreign-born Men” Demography, August 2002.) The IHCI model has major ramifications for U.S. productivity as illustrated in On Immigration and Native Entrepreneurship. With Seth Sanders, and more recently the book Human Capital Investment: A History of Asian Immigrants and Their Family Ties with Mark Regets, Seth Sanders and Phanindra Wunnuva, Duleep has pursued a family perspective on immigrant economic assimilation. She has provided testimony on family and employment based immigration before the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform on immigration.

Her work on the relationship between mortality and income in the U.S., starting with her MIT doctoral dissertation, Poverty and Inequality of Mortality, used longitudinal data on individual earnings and health matched to mortality records. It revealed a strong inverse relationship between income and mortality risk taking into account health problems that affect income. (Measuring the Effect of Income on Adult Mortality Using Longitudinal Administrative Record Data,” Journal of Human Resources, 1986) At the time, most economists thought that the inverse relationship between mortality and income was due to poor health lowering income rather than factors associated with low income affecting mortality. She continues to research factors underlying the inverse relationship in the U.S. between mortality and income (Earnings Growth versus Measures of Income and Education for Predicting Mortality)

In her work on discrimination and minority economic progress, she highlights flaws in the traditional economics methodology for measuring discrimination and underscores the need for testers to identify hiring discrimination (“The Measurement of Labor Market Discrimination When Minorities Respond to Discrimination,” in Cornwall and Wunnava, eds., New Approaches to Economic and Social Analyses of Discrimination).

In summary, two themes have propelled her research: the intersection of population and economic issues (e.g. The Labor/Land Ratio and India's Caste System and How the Demand for Labor May Adapt to the Availability of Labor) and the ostensibly small but vital details of measuring social and economic phenomena (e.g., Estimating More Precise Treatment Effects in Natural and Actual Experiments and How the earnings growth of US immigrants was underestimated, with Xingfei Liu and Mark Regets, Journal of Population Economics, (2022)