a theoretical and empirical analysis of family migration and household production reply of her household production as factors in the family s migration decisions 38 in this paper the research on family migration will be extended in three ways a formal model of household production and family migration will be developed and used to generate testable hypotheses about family migration variables which otherwise would not have a clear economic interpretation are incorporated into the model the model will then be estimated and some policy implications will be discussed one policy implication concerns the efficiency of the labor market labor market efficiency needs to be judged not only in terms of the efficiency of the job search of single individuals but also in terms of the efficiency of the joint job search of double income families this paper is organized into five sections first a comparative static household production model of locational choice is developed 2 next this model of locational choice is used to develop a theoretical model of family migration third the data and empirical model are discussed fourth the empirical results are reported and interpreted in terms of three different types of migration estimates of the impact of selected variables on the distance of the move are also considered the final section summarizes the general findings and offers some policy implications

endogenous information flows and the clustering of announcements we consider the strategic timing of information releases in a dynamic disclosure model because investors don t know whether or when the firm is informed the firm will not necessarily disclose immediately we show that bad market news can trigger the immediate release of information by firms conversely good market news slows the release of information by firms thus our model generates clustering of negative announcements surprisingly this result holds only when firms can preemptively disclose their own information prior to the arrival of external information these results have implications for conditional variance and skewness of stock returns jel d21 d83 g12 g14 l11

not only what but also when a theory of dynamic voluntary disclosure we examine a dynamic model of voluntary disclosure of multiple pieces of private information in our model a manager of a firm who may learn multiple signals over time interacts with a competitive capital market and maximizes payoffs that increase in both period prices we show perhaps surprisingly that in equilibrium later disclosures are interpreted more favorably even though the time the manager obtains the signals is independent of the value of the firm we also provide sufficient conditions for the equilibrium to be in threshold strategies

place to place migration in colombia the determinants of lifetime and recent place to place migration in colombia are investigated using unpublished data from the 1973 census the data cover 12 zones rural and urban segments of 6 regions and are analyzed for the population as a whole and for eight specific demographic groups including four educational categories and the two sexes the basic proposition is that areas economic opportunities play a central role in determining the spatial allocation of the population the results give strong support to the economic model of migration overall and in explaining differences in migration behavior among demographic groups excerpt

family and community networks in mexico u s migration a household s decision to send migrants is based on infornation it has on the entry costs expected returns and risks of migration information and assistance flow from both family migrant networks and community migrant networks using data from a national survey of rural mexican households we show the importance of networks in both the decision to migrate and the level of migration we find that community and family networks are substitutes in assisting migration suggesting that once migration is well established in a community family networks become less important in addition the development of strong community networks erases the role of household characteristics in migration allowing those initially least favored to also participate in migration finally we show that network density at points of destination in the united states strongly affects where individuals choose to migrate

labour migration and social networks participation in southern mozambique this paper investigates how social networks in poor developing settings are affected by migration using a unique household survey from southern mozambique we test the role of labour mobility in shaping participation in groups and interhousehold cooperation by migrant sending households in village economies at origin we find that migration cum remittances boosts household engagement in community based social networks our findings are robust to alternative definitions of social interaction and to endogeneity concerns suggesting that stable migration ties and higher income stability through remittances may decrease participation constraints and increase household commitment in cooperative arrangements in migrant sending communities

innovation and communication signalling with partial disclosure this paper introduces a model of feedback effect equilibrium i e equilibria in which an asymmetrically informed agent is motivated to communicate its privately known attribute but can do so only through channels or signals which convey directly useful information to competing agents this revelation to the competition serves to reduce the value of the private information held by the first agent models of this kind are of obvious relevance to realistic theories of product or financial market disclosure policies of firms patenting and a host of related behavioural and regulatory issues this model is developed in the context of a set of firms engaged in research and development rivalry in which the value of privately held and disclosed information arises from its implications for the likelihood and timing of productive innovation

labor market performance as a determinant of migration in a comparison of migrants with nonmigrants both observed and unobservable productivity factors are relevant this paper focuses more on the unobservable factors and their correlation between places of origin and destination a human capital model of migration demonstrates that more productive workers at the origin would choose to migrate only if the correlation between origin and destination factors is strongly positive longitudinal data drawn from the cote d ivoire living standards survey 1985 86 are used to examine the pattern of migration in the light of labor market performance both of wage employees and non farm self employed workers it is found that indeed the more productive workers migrate furthermore the general direction of migration is toward cities the conclusion is therefore that rural areas lose their productive workers and that urban areas may gain in productivity from the geographical shifts in population

models of currency crises with self fulfilling features the discomfort a government suffers from speculation against its currency determines the strategic incentives of speculators and the scope for multiple currency market equilibria after describing an illustrative model in which high unemployment may cause an exchange rate crisis with self fulfilling features the paper reviews some other self reinforcing mechanisms recent econometric evidence seems consistent with the practical importance of these mechanisms

migratory labor and agriculture farm workers are shown to respond strongly to economic incentives to seasonally migrate for work the economic model is specified with separate earnings structures for migratory and nonmigratory work and a reservation wage for migration is specified to reflect the choice between migratory and nonmigratory work the empirical model adjusts for self selectivity in the sample and demonstrates that domestic farm workers sort themselves into migratory and nonmigratory workers in a manner consistent with the theory of comparative advantage implications for immigration and government employment and training programs are considered

why do the young and educated in ldcs concentrate in large cities evidence from migration data do the young and educated in ldcs have a greater preference to locate in big cities if so this may help to explain how cities spatially concentrate the educated and young and why the rising share of these workers in many ldcs may contribute to city growth this paper explores migration flows into and out of egypt s three largest cities we study whether the higher shares of such workers in cities arise because these workers perceive relatively greater benefits from living in cities given relative urban rural wage rates or because the relative demand for these workers rises with city size

migrations risks and uncertainty a field experiment in china abstract we report data from the first incentivized artefactual field experiment conducted in china to understand whether chinese migrants differ from non migrants in terms of preferences regarding risk and uncertainty in various contexts we find that compared to non migrants migrants are significantly more likely to enter competitions when they expect competitive entries from others however migrants are not different from non migrants in risk and ambiguity preferences where strategic uncertainty is absent our results suggest that migration may be driven more by a stronger belief in one s chance of succeeding in an uncertain competitive environment than by differences risk attitudes related to state uncertainty

determinants of internal migration in israel expected returns and risks a multinomial logit model of place to place migration focusing on economic geographic and demographic factors is applied to empirical data on inter regional migration in israel in 1980 it explains 75 of the cross sectional variance in the data the results presented in this paper depart from previous empirical work due to its industrialized context and its focus on risk aversion as a determinant of the migration decision the results support the harris todaro 1970 hypothesis and indicate that regional similarities in the structure of industrial employment promote migration

a simultaneous equations analysis of urban development migration and industrial growth in israel s new towns abstract this study analyzes recent patterns of development of israel s new towns through application of a simultaneous equations econometric model this approach enables us to specify and test causal interactions among migration industrial investment employment and other structural and policy variables affecting urban development our results affirm the importance of economic opportunity agglomeration effects population socioeconomic and ethnic composition and access in determining migration flows at the same time unemployment and investment indices are affected by local labor market conditions government incentives and regional development effects as well as by population composition and migration flows policy implications of the analysis are considered

the shadow value of migrant remittances income and inequality in a household farm economy this article offers econometric evidence that income remittances sent home by family migrants stimulate household farm incomes indirectly by relieving credit and risk constraints on household farm production a high but unequally distributed shadow value of migrant remittances appears to reinforce an equalising direct effect of remittances on the income distribution across a sample of household farms in rural mexico

the check in the mail household characteristics and migrant remittance from the us to mexico we develop a household model of migrant remittance that supports testable hypotheses about the effect of migrant income family composition and distribution transaction costs associated with remittance mode income and residence security and other household characteristics on remittance levels and frequency we test these hypotheses using survey data on individual mexican migrants in the united states the results are broadly consistent with our hypotheses

intertemporal dynamics of corporate voluntary disclosures while empirical evidence alludes to the intertemporal nature of corporate voluntary disclosures most of the existing theory analyzes firms voluntary disclosure decisions within single period settings introducing a repeated multiperiod disclosure setting we study the extent to which firms strategic disclosure behavior in the past affects their prosperity to provide voluntary disclosures in the future our analysis demonstrates that by voluntarily disclosing private information firms make an implicit commitment to provide similar disclosures in the future and therefore are less willing to voluntarily disclose information in the first place this effect is expected to be of larger magnitude for firms 1 with a long history of absence of voluntary disclosures and an impressive past operating performance or 2 that operate in a relatively stable and predictable business and information environment or 3 whose managers have a long time horizon and a high degree of risk aversion

selective disclosures in the presence of uncertainty about information endowment abstract this paper analyzes a setting where firms could have private information from various sources and disclose a selective subset of that information investors have uncertainty about how much information firms have using a stylized model where there are two signals about a firm s future value and the firm may be privately informed of none one or all of those signals this paper establishes an equilibrium link between the cutoff value characterizing the partially informed firm s disclosure strategy and the partition of the signal space characterizing the fully informed firm s disclosure strategy the paper also discusses potential extensions of the model

migration trade and foreign direct investment in mexico part of the rationale for the north american free trade agreement nafta was that it will increase trade and foreign direct investment fdi flows creating jobs and reducing migration to the united states u s since poor data on illegal migration to the united states make direct measurement difficult data on migration within mexico where census data permit careful analysis are used instead to evaluate the mechanism behind predictions on migration to the united states specifications are provided for migration within mexico incorporating measures of cost of living amenities and networks contrary to much of the literature labor market variables enter very significantly and as predicted once possible credit constraint effects are controlled for greater exposure to fdi and trade deters outmigration with the effects working partly through the labor market finally some tentative inferences are presented about the impact of increased fdi on mexico u s migration on average a doubling of fdi inflows leads to a 1 5 to 2 percent drop in migration

agrarian structures urbanization and inequality summary this study examines the impact of agrarian structures on income inequality over the long run first it exhibits the relationship between land and income distribution by developing a theoretical model based on harris and todaro 1970 and lewis 1954 high land inequality increases income gini coefficients in the urban sector as well as the rural sector not only by creating congestion in the urban subsistence sector but also by feeding the growth of the urban reserve army of labor which pulls down the wages in the urban capitalist sector next the study investigates the empirical relationship between land inequality level of urbanization and income inequality using cross country datasets the estimation results support the theoretical model and indicate that the level of land inequality has a significant impact on determining the level of urbanization and urban and overall income inequalities moreover the analysis finds that overurbanization increases income inequality the empirical analysis controls for institutional factors like education inequality and the level of democracy the results present a stronger evidence on the land inequality s influence through urbanization than through education and democracy these results suggest that policymakers should have a broader view as to the importance of agrarian policies a progressive land reform or and subsidies protecting small peasantry can also reduce urban income inequality and poverty over the long run

international overborrowing a decomposition of credit and currency risks summary the severity of the financial crises enveloping the tiger economies of southeast asia in 1997 came as a surprise to many observers this paper uses a simple fisherian model of the overborrowing syndrome to compare the asian crises of 1997 with earlier overborrowing episodes in mexico and chile while important similarities exist the crises in southeast asia have been exacerbated by the unhedged foreign exchange positions of asian banks these open currency positions not only imposed significant additional losses on the banks following devaluation they also magnified the scale of overborrowing during the cycle s initial boom phase failure to limit the exposure of banks to foreign exchange risk therefore increased the magnitude of the boom bust overborrowing cycle both ex ante and ex post the paper highlights the importance of effective regulation and supervision of capital markets with a focus on limiting the speculative currency positions of banks especially those that form the core of the domestic payments system and therefore enjoy a possibly implicit public guarantee improving the institutional infrastructure of financial supervision is the only effective way of mitigating the macroeconomic costs of overborrowing

migration remittances and capital accumulation evidence from rural mexico this paper studies the link between migration remittances and productive assets accumulation for a panel of poor rural households in mexico over the period 19972006 in a context of nancial markets imperfections migration may act as a substitute for imperfect credit and insurance provision through remittances from migrants and thus exert a positive eect on investment however it may well be the case that remittances are channelled towards increasing consumption and leisure goods exploiting within family variation and an instrumental variable strategy we show that migration indeed accelerates productive assets accumulation moreover when we look at the eect of migration on consumption of non productive assets durable goods we nd instead a negative eect our results then suggest that

network effects and the dynamics of migration and inequality theory and evidence from mexico international migration is costly and initially only the middle class of the wealth distribution may have both the means and incentives to migrate which can increase inequality in the sending community however the migration networks formed lower the costs for future migrants which can in turn lower inequality this paper shows both theoretically and empirically that wealth has a nonlinear effect on migration and then examines the empirical evidence for an inverse u shaped relationship between emigration and inequality in rural sending communities in mexico after instrumenting we find that the overall impact of migration is to reduce inequality across communities with relatively high levels of past migration we also find some suggestive evidence for an inverse u shaped relationship among communities with a wider range of migration experiences

the underpinnings of country risk assessment abstract this paper surveys the history and current status of country risk assessment the motivation is to understand why it is that country risk assessors have such a poor track record in anticipating the onset of financial crises the development of the field reflects changes in the composition of international capital flows these changes have confounded a definition of country risk especially if a definition is centered on a particular event it is then argued that the field has reached an impasse and this impasse is related to the methods of abstraction and the current crisis of vision within the science of economics this crisis of vision as it pertains to theories of financial crises has led to increased reliance on quantitative methods in the field of country risk the paper concludes by proposing a new direction for the field the first step towards which is to recognize that the object of country risk assessment is not to monitor for a particular event or symptom of financial crisis but rather to monitor for a particular state of the economy

the roles of destination gender and household composition in explaining remittances an analysis for the dominican sierra two non exclusive hypotheses about what motivates remittances sent by dominican migrants to their rural parents in the sierra are tested a an insurance contract taken by parents with their migrant children and b an investment by migrants in potential bequests results show that the relative importance of these two motives to remit is affected by destination us vs cities in the dominican republic gender and household composition the insurance function is mainly fulfilled by female migrants to the us only when a male is the sole migrant in his household does he play the role of insurer investment by contrast is pursued by both males and females but only among those migrating to the us d 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

the emergence of migration theory and a suggested new direction abstract the literature on internal labour migration is surveyed using a fourfold taxonomic scheme the potential migrant as presented in the existing literature can be viewed as a supplier of labour an investor in human capital and a consumer of regional amenities such as public goods the paper develops a fourth approach which treats the household rather than the individual as the migrating unit and which views the potential migrant as a producer of home produced commodities the continuities as well as the contrasts between the four approaches are discussed in the paper

expectations information and migration the case of the west bank and gaza this study evaluates the determinants of palestinian migration from the west bank and gaza data are employed for the post 1967 period of israeli rule to specify and test competing models as well as the structure of expectations in the migration decision results of the analysis support a simple static expectation formulation as is consistent with much of the short term low mobility cost migration between the west bank and jordan findings further point to the importance of various israeli palestinian economic and political economic interactions in the determination of this controversial movement of population including those associated with employment opportunity for palestinian labour in israel elements of israeli west bank settlement policy and changes in local standard of living various policy implications of the research are indicated

disclosure and choice an agent chooses among projects with random outcomes his payoff is increasing in the outcome and in an observer s expectation of the outcome with some probability the agent will be able to disclose some information about the true outcome to the observer we show that choice is inefficient in general we illustrate this point with a characterization of the inefficiencies that result when the agent can perfectly disclose the outcome with some probability and can disclose nothing otherwise as in dye 1985a in this case the agent favours riskier projects even with lower expected returns on the other hand if information can also be disclosed by a challenger who prefers lower beliefs of the observer the chosen project is excessively risky when the agent has better access to information excessively risk averse when the challenger has better access and efficient otherwise we also characterize the agent s worst case equilibrium payoff we give examples of alternative disclosure technologies illustrating other forms the inefficiencies can take for example in a two dimensional setting we demonstrate a hitting for the fences effect where the agent systematically focuses on the harder dimension at the expense of success on the easier

risk aversion time preferences and out migration experimental evidence from ghana and indonesia abstract it has long been hypothesized that migrants and non migrants differ in their individual risk and time preferences due to a lack of reliable data on migrants preferences empirical evidence however is scarce therefore this paper has sought to advance research on preferences and migration decisions by using original household survey data from two developing countries that are both characterized by a longstanding tradition in regional migration in coastal communities in ghana and indonesia individual risk and time preferences have not only been elicited through survey questions but also through experimental tasks with real and relatively large monetary payoffs there is evidence that out migrants from both study regions are significantly less risk averse and have a lower time preference than non migrants overall the results indicate that the considered individual preferences are as important as employment status education or networks which have mainly been the focus of migration theories

on migration and risk in ldcs the authors develop the hypothesis that aversion to risk rather than expectations of higher income is the primary motivation for rural urban migration in developing countries this hypothesis maintains that an optimizing risk averse small farmer family will try to place a family member in the urban sector in order to diversify its income portfolio an additional hypothesis related to risk is also considered at the individual rather than the family level annotation

evidence games truth and commitment an evidence game is a strategic disclosure game in which an informed agent who has some pieces of verifiable evidence decides which ones to disclose to an uninformed principal who chooses a reward the agent regardless of his information prefers the reward to be as high as possible we compare the setup where the principal chooses the reward after the evidence is disclosed to the mechanism design setup where he can commit in advance to a reward policy the main result is that under natural conditions on the truth structure of the evidence the two setups yield the same equilibrium outcome

an analysis and critique of the bis proposal on capital adequacy and ratings abstract this paper examines two specific aspects of stage 1 of the bank for international settlement s bis s proposed reforms to the 8 risk based capital ratio we argue that relying on traditional agency ratings could produce cyclically lagging rather leading capital requirements resulting in an enhanced rather than reduced degree of instability in the banking and financial system despite this possible shortcoming we believe that sensible risk based weighting of capital requirements is a step in the right direction the current risk based bucketing proposal which is tied to external agency ratings or possibly to internal bank ratings however lacks a sufficient degree of granularity in particular lumping a and bbb investment grade corporate borrowers together with bb and b below investment grade borrowers severely misprices risk within that bucket and calls at a minimum for that bucket to be split into two we examine the default loss experience on corporate bonds for the period 1981 1999 and propose a revised weighting system which more closely resembles the actual loss experience on credit assets

rational and self fulfilling balance of payments crises speculative attacks on a pegged exchange rate must sometimes occur ifasset price paths are to be free of abnormal profit opportunities suchattacks are fully rational as they reflect the market s response to aregime breakdown that is inevitable the authors shows that under someexpectations about policy balance of payments crises can also be purely self fulfilling events in such cases even a permanently viableregime may collapse and the economy will possess multiple equilibriacorresponding to different subjective assessments of the probability ofa crisis the behavior of the domestic interest rate will naturally reflect the possibility of a speculative attack copyright 1986 by american economic association

good disclosure bad disclosure we study the implications of public information in a model where market prices convey information to relevant decision makers and the uctuation of market prices is driven by multiple factors disclosure has a positive direct eect of providing new information and an indirect eect of changing the price informativeness if disclosure is about a variable of which real decision makers are well informed then the indirect eect is also positive so that the direct eect is ampli ed leading to a positive overall eect on real e ciency if disclosure is about a variable that real decision markers care to learn much then the indirect eect is negative and the direct eect is attenuated moreover in markets which aggregate private information eectively the negative indirect eect can dominate so that disclosure can harm real e ciency

wages and unemployment in an urban african labour market this paper argues that urban labor markets in africa exhibit a wage curve similar to those found in the united states britain canada and other developed countries drawing on data from the ivory coast the author finds that urban wages are depressed by higher levels of unemployment this result is robust to changes in model specification and level of aggregation it is consistent with the model of wage determination developed by c shapiro and j stiglitz 1984 and d blanchflower and a oswald 1995 but not with claims that urban wages are invariant to unemployment copyright 1996 by royal economic society

are credit ratings procyclical abstract this paper studies the influence of the state of the business cycle on credit ratings in particular we assess whether rating agencies are excessively procyclical in their assignment of ratings our analysis is based on a model of ratings determination that takes into account factors that measure the business and financial risks of firms in addition to indicators of macroeconomic conditions utilizing annual data on all us firms rated by standard poor s we find that ratings do not generally exhibit excess sensitivity to the business cycle in addition we document that previously reported findings of a secular tightening of ratings standards are not robust to a more complete accounting of systematic changes to measures of risk

disclosures and asset returns public information in financial markets often arrives through the disclosures of interested parties who have a material interest in the reactions of the market to the new information when the strategic interaction between the sender and the receiver is formalized as a disclosure game with verifiable reports equilibrium prices can be given a simple characterization in terms of the concatenation of binomial pricing trees there are a number of empirical implications the theory predicts that the return variance following a poor disclosed outcome is higher than it would have been if the disclosed outcome were good also when investors are risk averse this leads to negative serial correlation of asset returns other points of contact with the empirical literature are discussed

when to drop a bombshell sender who is either good or bad wishes to look good at an exogenous deadline sender privately observes if and when she can release a public flow of information about her private type releasing information earlier exposes to greater scrutiny but signals credibility in equilibrium bad sender releases information later than good sender we find empirical support for the dynamic predictions of our model using data on the timing of u s presidential scandals and u s initial public offerings in the context of elections our results suggest that october surprises are driven by the strategic behaviour of bad sender

the long run creditworthiness of developing countries theory and practice this paper analyzes the determinants of developing country long run creditworthiness focusing on the process of capital accumulation relative to external debt creditworthiness depends on the actual capital stock compared with a critical level representing the gross wealth just sufficient to ensure that interest payments to foreigners never exhaust national output given expected gross inflows and existing outstanding debt hence the probability of rescheduling is linked to debt service capital net inflows capital investment rates and income levels the empirical results based on a probit analysis of historical rescheduling incidents are quite robust and supportive of the theoretical framework

bilateral trade with strategic gradual learning abstract we propose a model of bilateral trade in which private information about the quality of an asset can be acquired only gradually over time an asset is characterized by a vector of binary i i d attributes and its worth to a player is equal to a weighted sum of the attributes values where weights differ across players the seller is initially uninformed about the attributes values and each period he decides whether to make a price offer or to costlessly inspect an attribute s value the buyer does not know the attributes values but he may or may not observe which inspections were performed we consider both cases we study the seller s strategic scheduling of inspections and its effect on the realized gains from trade in equilibrium we identify the necessary and sufficient conditions under which the players can realize some gains from trade and all gains from trade

defying the law of gravity the political economy of international migration bilateral flows of international migrants exhibit tremendous variance both across destination countries and over time to explain this variance studies of international migration tend to focus on economic determinants such as income differentials or on social conditions such as the presence of coethnics in certain destination countries the authors argue that migration is driven not solely by economic or social determinants rather the political environment across destinations plays a substantively large role in influencing bilateral migration flows they test the importance of the political environment citizenship rights and the prominence of right wing parties using data on migration flows from 178 origin countries into 18 destination countries over the period 1980 2006 they find even after controlling for a variety of economic social policy and international variables that variation in political environments across time and destination plays a key role in observed patterns of international migration

undocumented mexico u s migration and the returns to households in rural mexico this paper presents estimates of net income gains to a sample of households in rural mexico from sending migrants illegally to the united states correcting for sample selectivity bias and it examines the role of expected income gains in driving illegal mexico u s migration there is no evidence that people who migrate illegally to the united states are above average contributors to household income either as workers in mexico or as mexico u s migrants however other things being equal villagers who are in the best position to contribute to household income as workers in mexico are positively selected not to migrate to the united states

diaspora growth and aggregate remittances an inverted u relationship this paper presents a model in which remittances stem from a decision made jointly by a family coalition of multiple migrants and non migrants allowing two alternative interpretations migrants a