• Introduction

  • Welcome to the personal website of David R. DeRemer. I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Business. My research fields are international economics (primary), industrial organization, political economy, environmental economics, law and economics, and international economic law. My work advances applied theory and applies modern empirical methods. My email address is david.deremer@nu.edu.kz.
  • New Working Paper

  • Firm Employment Dynamics in Kazakhstan after Sudden Russian Immigration (with Yelzhas Kadyr and Aigerim Yergabulova)
    NUGSB Working Paper 2023/09, October 2023.

    Kazakhstan was the top destination country for Russian immigrants in 2022, a year when Russian emigration sharply increased due to new international sanctions and war mobilization. The circumstances offer a rare opportunity to explore how a large sudden skill-abundant immigration within an economic union affects firm employment dynamics for a middle-income receiving country. Kazakhstan and Russia share the world's longest continuous land border, so immigration effects are regionally dispersed rather than concentrated solely in cities, and Kazakhstan offers business registers data to explore firm-level employment dynamics. Absent fine regional data on immigration flows, our empirical approach uses a pre-war share of the Russian population in 215 districts of Kazakhstan as a reduced-form instrument for the treatment of Russian immigration. We find no pre-war trends in firm employment growth related to the Russian district population shares. Using difference-in-differences estimation, we find large effects of 2022 Russian immigration on the employment growth for Kazakhstan's incumbent firms in more affected regions. The employment growth is larger for small firms, young foreign-owned firms, older domestic firms, and ICT firms, and results are robust to the exclusion or inclusion of Kazakhstan's two major cities of Almaty and Astana. We estimate that Kazakhstan's regions, excluding the two major cities, would have experienced a private sector employment fall of 86,500 in 2022 rather than the actual increase of 21,500 if Russian immigration flows had not occurred.  

  • Publications

  • Mountains of Evidence: The Effects of Abnormal Air Pollution on Crime (with Birzhan Batkeyev)
    Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization Vol. 210, pp. 288-319, June 2023.
    Accepted manuscript | The Academic

    We find that air pollution increases crime in a city that ranks in the worst two percentiles worldwide for dirty winter air. Our identification strategy employs distinct geographic features of Almaty, Kazakhstan: cleaner mountain winds and frequent temperature inversions. Using these variables to instrument for PM2.5 air pollution, we estimate a PM2.5 elasticity of the expected crime rate more than four times as large as similar estimates from cleaner cities. Among crime types, we estimate statistically significant effects of air pollution on property crime, and we find no evidence of an effect on violent crime. These results are consistent with theory that air pollution induces higher discounting rather than aggression. We extend this theory and find that whether air pollution has distinct effects on crimes of varying severity depends on whether the population is more heterogenous in the outside option or in the discount factor. Using microdata on crime severity, we find statistically significant increases in both major and minor crime rates from air pollution, and we fail to reject common PM2.5 elasticities of minor and major crime rates. The greater scale of major crimes implies that they contribute more to the total crime rate increase from air pollution. 

  • Opportunities for Cooperation in Removing Prohibitive Trade Barriers
    in The World Trade Organisation and Economic Development, Ben Zissimos (ed.), MIT Press, pp. 207‑240, December 2019.
    Working Paper | Manuscript | Book Preview
    Abstract
  • Getting Your Ducks in a Row: The Case for More Inclusive Renegotiations in EU — Poultry Meat (China) (with Federico Ortino)
    World Trade Review Vol. 18, pp. 309-326, April 2019.

    Abstract
  • Suspiciously Timed Trade Disputes (with Paola Conconi, Georg Kirchsteiger, Lorenzo Trimarchi, and Maurizio Zanardi),
    Journal of International Economics Vol. 105, pp. 57-76, March 2017.

    VoxEU | Media Coverage: Fortune | The Washington Post
    Abstract
  • Estimating the Impact of Low-Income Universal Service Programs (with Daniel A. Ackerberg, Michael H. Riordan, Gregory L. Rosston and Bradley S. Wimmer)
    International Journal of Industrial Organization Vol. 37, pp. 84-98, November 2014.
    Working Paper
    Abstract
  • Working Papers

  • The Principle of Reciprocity in the 21st Century
    Latest version, August 2022
    Slides, June 2023
    IEHAS Working Paper 1316, November 2016.
    Abstract
  • The Evolution of International Subsidy Rules 
    Latest version, August 2022
    Slides, September 2021
    ECARES Working Paper 2013-45, December 2013.
    Abstract
  • Agreements and Disputes over Behind-the-Border Non-Tariff Measures
    Latest version, October 2019
    FGV Direito SP Research Paper Series n. 110, October 2014.
    Abstract
  • Domestic Policy Coordination in Imperfectly Competitive Markets
    ECARES Working Paper 2013-46, December 2013.
    Abstract