the impacts of international migration on remaining household members omnibus results from a migration lottery program this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled the impacts of international migration on remaining household members omnibus results from a migration lottery program conducted in 2002 in tonga the study observed the impact of migration lottery program on the remaining household members of tongan emigrants on the individual and intra household level income falls rapidly by 22 to 25 percent with a rise in remittances failing to offset a large fall in labor earnings ownership of livestock durable and access to financial services is lower for the remaining household members diets change to be less nutritious and more rice and root crops immigration has a negative impact on household size there is no significant impact of migration on labor supply for men nor women funding for the study derived from the world bank stanford university the waikato management school and mardsen fund

international remittances and human capital formation summary this article investigates the effect of international migration on children left behind in peru the theoretical model is based on human capital theory and educational investment decision linked to remittances the model analyzes the role of international remittances on the investment decision between sending children to a public school or to a private school using data for the period 2007 10 this study addressed the problem of a left censored endogenous variable for panel data by using a two step estimation and found that international remittances have a positive effect on the likelihood to send children to private schools controlling for absenteeism of parents

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

do workers remittances reduce the probability of current account reversals the authors combine the literature on financial crises in emerging markets and developing economies with that on international migrations by investigating whether the increasingly large flows of workers remittances can help reduce the probability of current account reversals the rationale for this stands in the great stability and low cyclicality of remittances as compared with other private capital flows these properties combined with the fact that remittances are cheap inflows of foreign currencies might reduce the probability that foreign investors suddenly flee out of emerging markets and developing economies and trigger a dramatic current account adjustment the authors find that remittances can have such a beneficial effect in particular they show that a high level of remittances as a ratio of gdp makes the relationship between a decreasing stock of international reserves over gdp and a higher probability of current account crises less stringent the same occurs though less neatly for the positive relationship between an increasing stock of external debt over gdp and the probability of current account reversals the results point also to a threshold effect of remittances the mechanisms just described are in fact much stronger when remittances are above 3 percent of gdp

firm specific human capital job matching and turnover evidence from major league baseball 1900 1992 the two dominant labor market turnover hypotheses the firm specific human capital model fshcm and the job matching model suggest different patterns of player mobility in major league baseball the matching hypothesis predicts greater mobility of players in positions that require substantial team production a better match may offer large productivity gains alternately the fshcm predicts players in positions requiring the greatest amount of teamwork will benefit from specific knowledge making them less likely to change teams we examine the frequency distribution of trades by player position from 1900 1992 and find the fshcm provides the best explanation for turnover in this industry

does remittance fuel labour productivity in bangladesh the application of an asymmetric non linear ardl approach abstractbangladesh a labour abundant country is finally learning to reap gains from her labour abundance the historical under optimized capital labour ratio of bangladesh is slowly moving towards its optimum as the migration of its labour force and consequent inflow of remittance strategically converts its abundant labour into capital though the fear that remittance as an alternative source of earning may result in dutch disease for existing family members annual data for 1982 2013 and through applying standard testing methodologies our empirical findings suggest that such a fear is not valid since remittance flow significantly improves domestic labour productivity in bangladesh in the long run

do migrants improve governance at home evidence from a voting experiment can international migration promote better institutions at home by raising the demand for political accountability a behavioral measure of the population s desire for better governance was designed to examine this question a postcard was distributed to households promising that if enough postcards were mailed back results from a survey module on perceived corruption would be published in the national media data from a tailored household survey were used to examine the determinants of this behavioral measure of demand for political accountability undertaking the costly action of mailing the postcard and to isolate the positive effect of international emigration using locality level variation the estimated effects are robust to the use of instrumental variables including past migration and macro shocks in the destination countries the estimated effects can be attributed mainly to migrants who immigrated to countries with better governance especially migrants who return home

the effect of nonfarm income on investment in bulgarian family farming this article documents a relationship between nonfarm income primarily earnings and pensions and agricultural investment in bulgaria specifically expenditures on working capital variable inputs such as feed seed and herbicides and investment in livestock among those with positive spending on farm inputs the estimated elasticity of these expenditures with respect to nonfarm income is 0 14 nonfarm income also has an effect on the number of households that purchase farm animals with an estimated elasticity of 0 35 the use of nonfarm income for farm investment is consistent with the presence of credit constraints as is the fact that less than one percent of farmers report outstanding debts for agricultural purposes yet many farm households take out large unsecured loans for other purposes primarily to cover consumption expenditures implying that credit is available but that farmers prefer not to use borrowed funds to finance agricultural investment this would suggest that increases in the availability of agricultural credit may have little effect on farm outcomes whereas increases in nondebt financed sources of liquidity such as subsidies or transfers may better stimulate investment

remittances and development in latin america flows of workers remittances have become a major source of external finance for developing countries and are particularly important in latin america and the caribbean where they are estimated to have reached 40 billion in 2004 not surprisingly academics policymakers and development practitioners in general have been devoting increasing attention to the potential development impact that these flows may have on receiving countries this paper contributes to this debate along four dimensions first it reviews the evolution of remittances flows to latin america using balance of payments data and compares these statistics with estimates of remittances income based on household surveys second the paper describes the varying profile of remittances recipients in ten latin american countries third the paper reviews the few macro and microeconomic studies that have estimated the impact of remittances on poverty and inequality finally the paper expands some of the existing works to investigate the extent to which that impact is different in latin america and varies across countries in the region

remittances liquidity constraints and human capital investments in ecuador summary over the last decade ecuador has experienced a strong increase in financial transfers from migrated workers this paper investigates how remittances via trans national networks affect human capital investments through relaxing resource constraints and facilitate households in consumption smoothing by reducing vulnerability to economic shocks our results show that remittances increase school enrollment and decrease incidence of child work especially for girls and in rural areas furthermore we find that aggregate shocks are associated with increased work activities while remittances are used to finance education when households are faced with these shocks 2008 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

migration and imperfect monitoring implications for intra household allocation studies of the impact of migration on sending households e g dean yang 2004 alejandra c edwards and manuelita ureta 2003 have largely neglected the fact that certain allocations can only be imperfectly monitored when household members are not coresident see ralph chami et al 2003 for an exception in this case allocations can be coordinated only to the extent that they can be verified and household decision making may not be fully cooperative the existence of such behavior among household members would suggest that expanding opportunities for migration will have different effects on expenditure patterns than simply increasing the amount of income received by the household changes in earned income and the potential to earn income will affect bargaining among spouses but noncooperative behavior will have an additional effect on the final distribution of household resources with the

school attendance child labour and remittances from international migration in el salvador abstract international migrant remittances can increase household budget and reduce liquidity constraint problems generating consumption and investment opportunities for recipient households in particular remittances can enable investing in children s human capital and reduce child labour key outcomes from the perspective of growth in a developing country using data for el salvador this article shows a a null or insignificant overall impact of remittances on schooling b a strong reduction of child wage labour in remittance recipient households and c an increase in unpaid family work activities for children in those households moreover the evidence shows important differences by gender and age of the child in consideration while girls seem to indeed increase school attendance upon remittance receipts by reducing labour activities boys do not benefit on average from higher schooling but some time substitution takes place favouring family work activities over paid jobs and among secondary sc

remittances and financial access is there really a link and for whom evidence from mexican household data in policy discussions it has frequently been claimed that migrants remittances could function as a catalyst for financial access among receiving households this paper provides empirical evidence on this hypothesis from mexico a major receiver of remittances worldwide using the mexican family life survey panel mxfls for 2002 and 2005 the results from the fixed effects logit model show that receiving remittances is strongly correlated with the ownership of savings accounts and to a limited degree with the availability of borrowing options effects are particularly important for microfinance institutions and more important for rural households compared to urban households

job duration seniority and earnings an important stylized fact about labor markets is that workers with longer seniority with their current employer have higher earnings than other workers with the same total labor market experience this study shows that workers in longer jobs earn more throughout than workers in a series of shorter jobs and that the measured positive cross sectional return seniority is largely a statistical artifact due to the correlation of seniority with an omitted variable representing the quality of the worker the job or the worker employer match the implication is tha t earnings do not in fact rise very much with seniority copyright 1987 by american economic association

remittances and financial inclusion evidence from el salvador this paper investigates the impact of remittances on financial inclusion this is an important issue given recent studies showing that financial inclusion can have significant beneficial effects on households using household level survey data for el salvador the authors examine the impact of remittances on households use of savings and credit instruments from formal financial institutions they find that although remittances have a positive impact on financial inclusion by promoting the use of deposit accounts they do not have a significant and robust effect on the demand for and use of credit from formal institutions if anything by relaxing credit constraints remittances might reduce the need for external financing from financial institutions while at the same time increasing the demand for savings instruments

migrant remittances and fertility abstractthis study examines the role of migrants remittances in developing countries fertility transition employing an unbalanced panel of south asian countries and controlling for various economic and socio demographic factors we find that remittances are significantly associated with a lower number of children born to women of childbearing age this suggests the remittances substitution effect to be at play rather than the income effect and may result from decreased need for children for financing the household s future needs as well as from better access to healthcare and contraceptive methods available to migrant households remittances association with fertility appears to be more important than the transfer of fertility norms from migrants host countries the monetary aspects of international migration may therefore be more important for the region s demographic transition than social remittances

revisiting the threshold effect of remittances on total factor productivity growth in south asia a study of bangladesh and india abstractboth bangladesh and india are among the top recipient of remittances in absolute terms however in relative terms remittances as a per cent of gdp the two countries stand at 6 1 and 2

life cycle schooling and dynamic selection bias models and evidence for five cohorts of american males this paper examines an empirical regularity found in many societies that family influences on the probability of transiting from one grade level to the next diminish at higher levels of education we examine the statistical model used to establish the empirical regularity and the intuitive behavioral interpretation often used to rationalize it we show that the implicit economic model assumes myopia the intuitive interpretive model is identified only by imposing arbitrary distributional assumptions onto the data we produce an alternative choice theoretic model with fewer parameters that rationalizes the same data and is not based on arbitrary distributional assumptions

remittances and public finances evidence from oil price shocks we study the effect of inflowing remittances a major source of capital for many countries on tax revenues and tax policy instrumenting remittances with changes in the oil price interacted with a country s distance to oil producing countries we find that remittances have a large positive effect on vat revenues but no effect on income tax revenues this suggests that remittances often escape the income tax but can be taxed via consumption we further show that tax policy is responsive to shocks in incoming remittances remittances make the adoption of vat systems more likely and they lead to lower vat rates and higher income tax rates

do wages rise with job seniority many previous studies have found a strong positive effect of job seniority tenure on wages this paper re examines the evidence using a simple instrumental variables scheme to deal with the fact that tenure is likely to be related to unobserved individual and job characteristics that affect the wage we use the variation of tenure over a given job match as the principal instrumental variable for tenure the variation in tenure over the job is uncorrelated by construction with the fixed individual and job match specific components of the error term of the wage equation our main finding is that the partial effect of tenure on wages is small and that general labour market experience and job shopping account for most wage growth over a career the strong cross section relationship between tenure and wages is due primarily to heterogeneity bias prior researchers see mincer and jovanovic 1981 bartel and borjas 1981 borjas 1981 cline 1979 and mellow 1981 and many others have established that job seniority has a strong positive relationship with wage rates in a cross section or a cross section time series of individuals in this paper we re evaluate the evidence concerning the partial effects on wages of job seniority tenure and total labour market experience the extent to which wages rise with tenure is important for several reasons first and foremost the wage tenure profile is a fundamental question about the structure of earnings over careers second the wage tenure profile is a key determinant of the extent to which the earnings power of individuals is tied to specific jobs and it is important for assessment of the losses suffered by displaced workers hamermesh 1984 third evidence that wages rise with job tenure has been used to explain the decline in quits with tenure since the wage growth on the current job lowers the probability that the worker will locate a superior alternative a growing theoretical literature surveyed in parsons 1984 has taken the evidence of a strong wage tenure profile at face value and sought to provide an explanation for the relationship the most prominent explanation is the theory of specific human capital oi 1962 becker 1962 mincer 1974 parsons 1972 kuratani 1973 and hashimoto 1980 in which the growth of wages with tenure holding experience constant is attributed to the worker s share of investments in firm specific skills more recently lazear 1981 has presented a supervision model of wage growth in which firms defer compensation as a means of inducing workers not to shirk freeman 1977 and harris and holmstrom 1982 provide an explanation for wage growth based on an insurance motive salop and salop 1976 nickell 1976 and guasch and weiss 1982 present adverse selection models of wage growth in which firms use a wage tenure profile as a

international migration remittances and schooling evidence from el salvador abstract we examine the effect of remittances from abroad on households schooling decisions using data for el salvador following the massive war related emigration of the 1980s remittances became a significant source of household income throughout the 1990s we use the cox proportional hazard model to examine the determinants of school attendance measuring income from a source that is uncorrelated with parental schooling remittances we find that remittances have a large significant effect on school retention we estimate that while household income net of remittances has a small though significant impact on the hazard of leaving school in rural and urban areas remittances have a much larger impact on the hazard of leaving school in urban areas the effect of remittances is at its smallest 10 times the size of the effect of other income in rural areas the effect of remittances is about 2 6 times that of other income our finding is of interest in that it suggests that subsidizing school attendance particularly in poor areas may have a large impact on school attendance and retention even if parents have low levels of schooling

do the return intentions of french migrants affect their transfer behaviour abstractthis paper investigates to what extent the return behaviour of migrants affects their transfer decisions both at the extensive and intensive margins we use a unique data set collected on migrants aged 45 70 living in france with detailed information on both return intentions at retirement and on private transfers we find that the temporary nature of migration strongly influences the pattern of transfers made by migrants the probability of remitting for either personal savings or to family members in the origin country increases by more than 10 percentage points with return plans the latter having no effect on gifts to family members living in france at the intensive margin the amount of personal savings sent to the origin country is about twice as high for migrants who intend to return

remittances and the use of formal and informal financial services summary while recent literature has pointed to a positive effect of migrants remittances on the financial development of receiving countries findings with respect to access to and the use of loans have been ambiguous this paper investigates the effect of remittances on the use of formal and informal financial services using mexican household data and finds positive and statistically significant effects of remittances on the ownership of savings accounts the existence of debts and on recent borrowing the fact that the effect of remittances on borrowing is driven by informal finance rather than by traditional bank loans points to deficiencies of the formal financial sector in addressing the financial needs of remittance receiving households we address methodological concerns of selection bias and reverse causality through household fixed effects and an instrumental strategy that exploits distance to train lines and labor market conditions in the us as exogenous determinants of remittances

the impact of international remittances on child outcomes and household expenditures in nepal abstractnepal has one of the highest ratios of international remittances to gross domestic product in the world we examine whether the massive inflow of international remittances affects child schooling child labour and household expenses controlling extensively for a host of observed characteristics of households and migrants and using an instrumental variable approach this research finds no effect of international remittances on child education or child labour in nepal however it does find a significant increase in non food expenditures including education spending due to international remittances despite increased expenditure on child education educational outcomes are not improving because of international remittances

remittances in small island developing states abstract we examine how remittances relate to the exchange rate natural disasters and foreign aid focusing on small island developing states sids using panel var methods we are able to compensate for both data limitations and endogeneity issues while remittances respond to innovations in the macroeconomic variables included in the analysis remittances also have important impacts on these variables furthermore the impact of remittances differs in sids economies relative to the set of all developing economies remittances appear to depreciate the real exchange in sids economies whereas they appreciate the real exchange rate when a broader sample of economies is considered

is there a slowdown in agricultural productivity growth in south america this article estimates agricultural productivity growth in 10 south american countries in 1969 2009 with the objective of investigating if the slowdown being measured in other countries is present in the region results show that productivity growth accounts for half of the three fold increase in agricultural output during this period and that performance is sensitive to r d investments in the sector the slowdown found for the 1990s to 2000s in the u s and some european economies does not seem to be present yet in south america the region s total factor productivity tfp growth rate increased steadily from 1 07 during the 1970s to 2 29 during the 2000s given lags in adoption and the adaptive nature of innovations in these economies we have yet to see the potential effects in south american agriculture of decreases in r d in advanced economies

don t tell on me experimental evidence of asymmetric information in transnational households although most theoretical models of household decision making assume perfect information empirical studies suggest that information asymmetries can have large impacts on resource allocation i demonstrate the importance of these asymmetries in transnational households where physical distance between family members can make information barriers especially acute i implement an experiment among migrants in washington dc and their families in el salvador that examines how information asymmetries can have strategic and inadvertent impacts on remittance decisions migrants make an incentivized decision over how much of a cash windfall to remit and recipients decide how they will spend a remittance migrants strategically send home less when their choice is not revealed to recipients recipients make spending choices closer to migrants preferences when the migrants preferences are shared regardless of whether or not the spending choices are revealed to the migrants suggesting that recipients choices are inadvertently affected by imperfect information

the effect of job tenure on wage offers a wage offer can be either acceptable or unacceptable to a worker but in cross sectional and panel data only acceptable wage offers are observed an ols wage equation will not reveal how job tenure affects wage offers but rather will reveal how tenure affects acceptable wage offers by jointly modeling the firm s determination of the wage offer and the worker s decision to accept or reject the offer we are able to estimate the effect of job tenure on wage offers consistently in contrast to the usual ols results we find that job tenure has no statistically significant effect on wage offers

why do wages increase with tenure on the job training and life cycle wage growth observed within firms empirical results in this paper indicate that firm specific wage growth occurs almost exclusively during periods of on the job training this finding suggests that within firm wage growth is mainly determined by contemporaneous productivity growth the results provide no evidence that contractual considerations are an important source of firm specific wage growth copyright 1989 by american economic association

international migration and nutritional outcomes in tajikistan abstract tajikistan is the country with the largest share of remittances to gdp in the world at the same time it suffers from stubbornly high levels of child malnutrition against which only very slow progress has been made this paper investigates the relationship between international migration and child malnutrition using data from a recent nationally representative household survey there are theoretical reasons to expect that migration may be exerting both positive and negative effects on nutrition and food security so that understanding what the net effect may be is essentially an empirical question our results indicate that migration appears to be playing a positive role in enhancing child growth patterns as measured by height for age z scores in the country we explore some of the possible channels through which this effect might be operating and find that one such channel is by increasing households kilocalorie consumption

the effects of external migration on enrolments accumulated schooling and dropouts in punjab external migration in developing countries can relax household income constraints because of external remittances this paper looks at whether the external migration of individuals in a household has a positive effect on schooling outcomes of children as measured by school enrolments accumulated level of schooling number of days spent in school and dropouts in punjab historic migration rates were used to instrument for migration in an analysis of school outcomes for children of different ages to see which group has been most affected by external migration the results show a significantly positive impact of external migration on the enrolments of younger children whereas the accumulated level of schooling for older children increases significantly if there is an external migrant in the household

do remittances diminish social violence abstractthis paper represents the first attempt to formalise the relationship between remittances and social violence by developing a model that predicts that migrants remittances lead to the reduction of social violence in the recipient economy under the condition that remittances increase the average product of labour using homicide data as an indicator of social violence we tested our model s prediction controlling for the endogeneity problem with appropriate instruments we found that remittances tend to reduce social violence we performed sensitivity analysis on remittances in the empirical specification and found it robust with an unchanged negative sign

revisiting the brain drain literature with insights from a dynamic general equilibrium world model the existing brain drain literature has found various mechanisms through which the high skilled south to north migration affects developing economies however some of the new found effects remain disputable due to limited evidence this study aimed to provide suggestive guidelines for future research by identifying the mechanisms that can generate larger economic impacts at the aggregate the analysis is based on a dynamic general equilibrium world model that is calibrated to published statistics and incorporates empirical estimates on the effects of brain drain it simulates short and long run impacts of increased brain drain on gdp per capita gni per capita and income inequality the results suggest that more studies should be conducted to further examine how the brain drain influences human capital formation and technology spillovers both have significant impacts on domestic production and national income a better understanding of different remitting patterns is also desirable to understand how to reduce inequality and promote recipients investment in productive assets

effect of remittances on poverty and financial development in sub saharan africa summary this paper assesses the effect of the steadily growing remittance flows to sub saharan africa though the region receives only a small portion of the total recorded remittances to developing countries and the volume of aid flows to sub saharan africa swamps remittances this paper finds that remittances which are a stable private transfer have a direct poverty mitigating effect and promote financial development these findings hold even after factoring in the reverse causality between remittances poverty and financial development the paper posits that formalizing such flows can serve as an effective access point for unbanked individuals and households