Research

Job Market Paper

Sun, Sand, and Services: Tourism and Household Welfare in Jamaica - Current Draft: (02/02/26)

Abstract Tourism services have seen marked growth over the previous two decades. A number of lower and middle-income countries have sought to take advantage of this boom in demand for tourism in the hopes of driving economic development. Even so, there remain significant questions about the ability of tourism to contribute to robust and inclusive prosperity for local populations in developing countries. I address this gap in the literature by investigating these questions in Jamaica, an upper middle-income country that has made the export of tourism services the foundation of its development strategy. I combine an incredibly rich and granular dataset of tourist expenditure surveys from the Jamaican Ministry of Tourism, with a detailed nationally representative household expenditure survey, both spanning nearly two decades. Linking tourist activity and individual households across consistent spatial units, I employ a shift-share instrumental variable identification strategy to estimate the effects of changes in tourism revenues on the welfare of local households. I find increases in real consumption and welfare for urban households, working in mid-skilled occupations in non-tourism services and manufacturing. I discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the welfare impacts of tourism specialization in developing countries, and for the design of policies that aim to harness and scale tourism in service of development.

Slides: Job Market Paper: Slides

Presented at: Center For The Study of African Economies Annual Conference (March 2025);
Upcoming: 2025 Global Labor Organization JOPE Conference (Dec 2025); ASSA Annual Meetings - Poster Session (Jan 2026); Midwest Development Conference (Apr 2026)


Working Papers

Market Structure and Development: Firm Competition in Jamaica  —  Current Draft: (02/28/26)

New

Abstract Growing specialization in services has become a defining feature of many emerging economies, and the tradable service sector of tourism has been a key contributor to this growth. Despite the importance of tourism services, the roles of market structure and product composition in shaping the development outcomes of specialization in tourism are not well understood. This paper fills this gap in the literature by characterizing the relationship between the organization of the Jamaican hotel industry and three development objectives. I estimate a nested logit demand system for the Jamaican hotel industry, and the supply function for hotel parent companies to form a partial equilibrium model of the country's accommodations sector. I then conduct counterfactual simulations in which I vary the entry of new hotels to Jamaican markets, the ownership structures of these hotels, and the tax regime applied to the sector. I find that demand for accommodations is relatively price-inelastic with a mean own-price elasticity of -1.43, which is consistent with the more premium-focused tourism style of Jamaica. Consumers are generally inelastic in their preferences for multinational-owned all-inclusive resorts, and counterfactual simulations show that the entry of these firms largely attracted customers who otherwise would not have visited. The addition of new products by non-incumbent firms is optimal for increasing arrivals and employment, and a more progressive ad-valorem tax structure can raise tourism tax revenues 55 percent with minimal impact on employment and total tourist expenditures.
Nowcasting Global Trade from Space _with Serkan Arslanalp, Seung Mo Choi, Parisa Kamali, Robin Koepke, Michele Ruta, Mario Saraiva, Alessandra Sozzi, and Jasper Verschuur_
● IMF Working Paper (05/2025)
Abstract We introduce a nowcasting model of global maritime trade, leveraging satellite-based big data on vessel movements. This provides a timely indicator of global trade as shipping accounts for about 80 percent of worldwide merchandise trade by volume. Our approach mimics key features of the way statisticians compile trade data—measuring the customs value of imported and exported goods, forming import and export price deflators, and then estimating import and export volumes. We show how global and regional nowcasts can be obtained using port-level data from IMF PortWatch and highlight important enhancements to the platform since its beta launch in November 2023. Finally, we demonstrate how the monthly nowcasts can be used to monitor fragmentation and regionalization in global maritime trade.
Abstract A large literature has estimated the effects of climate change on agricultural yields. That work assumes, but rarely tests, that changes in yields translate directly into changes in household wellbeing. Such assumptions elide the rather large literature on resilience to climate and other shocks. This work uses satellite derived yield data (GCVI) to analyze the relationship between agricultural productivity and household welfare, as measured by overall and food expenditure in the West African Sahel. We use remotely-sensed vegetation indices as a proxy for crop yields, as well as a granular household level dataset from 85\% of Mali's administrative communes between 2011 and 2019. Calculating commune-level indices for each growing season, we are then able to estimate their effects on household level expenditures for two growing seasons per household. As expected, we find that changes in yields have a statistically significant effect on overall household expenditure as well as other expenditure categories (food, leisure, etc.) for rural dwellers. This effect for rural dwellers is, however, relatively muted to changes in the values of vegetation indices, with GCVI to expenditure elasticities in the range of 0.10. Such low expenditure elasticities for changes in yields indicates a large degree of resilience to climate-related variation in agricultural productivity by Malian rural households. We draw conclusions based on this work for policy makers and for researchers interested in using remote sensed data for climate change and resilience research.
Beaches or Books: Tourism Shocks and Human Capital Accumulation
Abstract Schooling decisions by households are shaped by the opportunity costs of lost wages inherent in children pursuing an education. Research has shown for example, that positive manufacturing shocks in an area can increase drop-out rates. What is still not well understood, is the extent to which shocks to demand for major service sector industries influence household educational investments. I fill this gap in the literature by studying the impacts of increases in tourism intensity on schooling in the context of Jamaica, where tourism exports comprise a major share economic output. Exploiting temporal and geographic variation in tourism activity across the country, I investigate the extent to which increased tourism demand shocks interact with household socioeconomic status, parental schooling, and geographic distance from schooling facilities to influence household investment in education at key points in a child's educational career. From these findings I then draw conclusions about the potential trade-offs between tourism induced changes in human capital investments for households and tourism-driven economic development.