Topics In International Trade and Migration

Abstract

This dissertation comprises three essays on firm uncertainty, data investment, and political responses to migration. The first chapter examines the political backlash triggered by the 2015 European refugee crisis. Using a shift-share instrument that exploits pre-crisis asylum seeker nation- ality compositions to predict differential exposure across European countries, I estimate the causal effect of refugee inflows on migration policy restrictiveness. Crisis exposure gen- erated a significant tightening of migration policy, concentrated in border control and en- forcement rather than legal migration channels. A bystander analysis reveals that even countries with minimal direct exposure tightened policy, suggesting contagion effects that operate through political rather than demographic channels. The second and third chapters develop a unified framework for understanding how firms use data to resolve operational uncertainty. The second chapter documents that larger firms produce more accurate revenue forecasts, decomposes this advantage into ac- tionable and non-actionable channels using revenue volatility controls, and calibrates a structural model revealing the operational execution channel as the primary driver. A counterfactual exercise shows that improvements in data technology are progressive, dis- proportionately benefiting smaller firms. The third chapter extends this framework to international trade, introducing active data investment as a choice variable and exploiting a novel matched employer-employee dataset linking French administrative records to firm-level data hiring. Data investment predicts both entry into and survival in foreign markets.