'The Influence of Corruption on Migration Inflows to the United States'

The Global Studies Seminar presents “The Influence of Corruption on Migration Inflows to the United States” by Denison University’s Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics Botir B. Okhunjanov.

The main focus of the research paper is to analyze how corruption in immigrants’ home countries influences their migration to the United States. While many previous studies suggest a positive correlation between domestic corruption and emigration, this is not always the case. Using the change point estimation, Okhunjanov segments the U.S. immigration data into three distinct partitions based on their corruption scores. The results of the fixed-effects estimator suggests that positive correlation between corruption and immigration exists only for countries with medium levels of corruption. On the other hand, people from countries with low levels of corruption immigrate less as domestic corruption increases.

Okhunjanov is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Denison University. He received his Doctor of Philosophy in Economics from Washington State University. His research interests are applied microeconomics and applied statistics, and has recently worked on the topics related to behavior of firms, the impacts of Covid on economic markets, water resources and migration.