Alok Inspired by Asad Islam

Genetic distance, immigrants’ identity, and labor market outcomes The relationship between immigrants’ ethnic identity and their labor market performance is a subject of strong policy and academic debate. While numerous empirical studies indicate that culture and identity shape labor market outcomes, causal interpretations remain elusive due to endogeneity: labor market performance and identity attitudes are often mutually influential. In this study, Asadul Islam and Paul A. Raschky propose an innovative solution: using genetic distance between an immigrant’s home and host country as an instrumental variable for ethnic identity, thereby isolating the exogenous component that captures deep-rooted cultural differences. Methodology The study utilizes data from Canada’s Equality, Security, and Community (ESC) Survey, rich in variables related to immigrant identity, ancestry, labor market performance, and demographic controls. Immigrants’ identity is measured both as the stated importance o...

Designing efficient and equitable electricity pricing is a perennial challenge in developing countries experiencing rapid urbanization. Bangladesh, with its swift economic growth and urban expansion, faces a persistent gap between electricity demand and supply. This blog post draws upon the rigorous study by Hemawathy Balarama, Asad Islam, Jun Sung Kim, and Liang Choon Wang, which leverages household panel data and an exogenous value-added-tax (VAT) shock to estimate short-run price elasticities of residential electricity demand in Bangladesh’s urban centers. Data and Identification Strategy The authors’ dataset comprises three rounds of surveys from households in Dhaka, Jessore, and Khulna—large urban districts with similar climate regimes. The research exploits an exogenous VAT-induced change in electricity prices during the survey period, enabling a robust identification strategy through fixed-effect instrumental variable (FE-IV) estimation. This method isolates causal effects, addr...

In “The Economic Returns to Good Looks and Risky Sex in the Bangladesh Commercial Sex Market,” Asad Islam investigates how physical attractiveness and risky sexual behaviors affect sex workers’ earnings. His findings are eye-opening: while attractive sex workers do earn a premium for their looks, this premium is on par with women’s returns to beauty in non-sexual occupations. The ‘beauty premium’ is not unique to sex work, but a broader social reality that affects women in many labor markets. Perhaps more striking is the finding that engaging in unsafe (unprotected) sex, despite inherent dangers such as HIV/STDs, yields even higher earnings—especially for attractive workers. This suggests that in the high-stakes world of commercial sex, beauty and risk can jointly heighten bargaining positions and incomes, albeit at tremendous personal cost. Islam’s work is methodologically rigorous, controlling for social, demographic, and labor variables. He shows that factors such as education, expe...