why don t remittances appear to affect growth although measured remittances by migrant workers have soared in recent years macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth this paper reviews existing explanations for this puzzle and proposes three new ones first it offers evidence that a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory arising from changes in measurement not changes in real financial flows second it shows that even if these increases were correctly measured cross country regressions would have too little power to detect their effects on growth third it points out that the greatest driver of rising remittances is rising migration which has an opportunity cost to economic product at the origin net of that cost there is little reason to expect large growth effects of remittances in the origin economy migration and remittances clearly have first order effects on poverty at the origin on the welfare of migrants and their families and on global gross domestic product but detecting their effects on growth of the origin economy is likely to remain elusive

co2 emissions and income dynamics what does the global evidence tell us this paper analyzes the co evolution of two major determinants of social welfare namely income and carbon emissions in particular by using a distribution dynamics approach based on markov chains we investigate the shape and behavior of the joint distribution of per capita income and carbon dioxide emissions we arrive at several interesting conclusions especially in the context of international negotiations on climate change first evidence does not support theoretical models predicting the existence of a poverty environment trap specifically in the long run two main groups of countries will emerge poor versus polluting countries second the typical development path leads initially to high emission levels and subsequently to high income third the convergence process towards the stationary distribution is very slow finally for carbon emissions whenever it is observed the environmental kuznets curve seems to be only a transitory phenomenon

on the equivalence of nash and evolutionary equilibrium in finite populations abstract this paper provides sufficient and partially necessary conditions for the equivalence of symmetric nash and evolutionary equilibrium in symmetric games played by finite populations the conditions are based on generalized constant sum and smallness properties the latter of which is known from models of perfect competition and large games the conditions are illustrated on examples including oligopoly games

how important is selection experimental vs non experimental measures of the income gains from migration measuring the gain in income from migration is complicated by non random selection of migrants from the general population making it difficult to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non migrants this paper uses a migrant lottery to overcome this problem providing an experimental measure of the income gains from migration new zealand allows a quota of tongans to immigrate each year with a lottery to choose among the excess number of applicants a unique survey conducted by the authors in these two countries allows experimental estimates of the income gains from migration by comparing the incomes of migrants to those who applied to migrate but whose names were not drawn in the lottery after allowing for the effect of non compliance among some of those whose names were drawn the authors also conducted a survey of individuals who did not apply for the lottery comparing this non applicant group with the migrants enables assessment of the degree to which non experimental methods can provide an unbiased estimate of the income gains from migration they find evidence of migrants being positively selected in terms of both observed and unobserved skills as a result non experimental methods are found to overstate the gains from migration by 9 to 82 percent a good instrumental variable works best while difference in differences and bias adjusted propensity score matching also perform comparatively well

an evolutionary model of bertrand oligopoly we analyze the long run outcome of markets in which boundedly rational firms with a decreasing returns to scale technology compete in prices the behavior of these firms is based on limitation of success and experimentation in this framework we introduce a new approach to model boundedly rational behavior based on the idea of behavioral principles i e formal descriptions even with the simplest ones the result is that the prices announced are a strict refinement of the set of nash equilibria with more sophisticated behavioral principles the long run outcome corresponds to the concept of central prices wich are also nash equilibria introduced here this is a robust and clear cut prediction wich under quadratic costs and arbitrary demand essentially coincides with the walrasian equilibrium

no man left behind effects of emigration prospects on educational and labour outcomes of non migrants the development impacts of emigration are largely determined by the education of those who stay behind departure of workers leads to a direct loss of human capital but opportunities for emigration also raise expected returns to education i examine these effects by considering the introduction of education as a selection criterion to recruit nepalese men in the british army this change raised educational investments by 1 15 years and increased the average education of men living in nepal even after allowing for emigration despite not being selected in the british army or emigrating elsewhere these non migrants benefited directly from additional schooling

evolutionary equilibrium in contests with stochastic participation entry effort and overdissipation this paper examines the evolutionary stability of behaviour in contests where players participation can be stochastic we find for exogenously given participation probabilities players exert more effort under the concept of a finite population evolutionarily stable strategy fpess than under nash equilibrium ne we show that there is ex ante overdissipation under fpess for sufficiently large participation probabilities if and only if the impact function is convex with costly endogenous entry players enter the contest with a higher probability and exert more effort under fpess than under ne importantly under endogenous entry overdissipation can occur for all tullock contest success functions in particular those with concave impact functions

competitive behavior in market games evidence and theory we explore whether competitive outcomes arise in an experimental implementation of a market game introduced by shubik 1972 market games obtain pareto inferior strict nash equilibria in which some markets are closed we find that subjects do not coordinate on autarkic nash equilibria but favor more efficient nash equilibria in which all markets are open as the number of subjects participating in the market game increases the nash equilibrium they achieve approximates the associated walrasian equilibrium of the underlying economy motivated by these findings we investigate theoretically whether evolutionary forces lead to walrasian outcomes in market games we introduce a strong version of evolutionary stable strategies sess f orfinite populations our concept requires stability against deviations by coalitions of agents a small coalition of trading agents is sufficient for pareto improving trade to be generated in addition provided that agents lack market power nash equilibria corresponding to approximate competitive outcomes constitute the only approximate sess

an evolutionary interpretation of van huyck battalio and beil s experimental results on coordination this paper proposes an adaptive interpretation of the results of some recent experiments with repeated tacit coordination games these experiments revealed several behavioral regularities including a systematic discrimination between strict nash equilibria in certain games that appear to be driven by strategic uncertainty and are not explained by traditional equilibrium refinements the observed patterns of discrimination correspond closely to predictions based on maynard smith s notion of evolutionary stability an adaptive model in the spirit of the evolutionary dynamics but recognizing the important differences between learning in human populations and evolution promises to yield a unified explanation of the results journal of economic literature classification numbers 020 026

the aggregate effect of air pollution regulation on co2 mitigation in china s manufacturing industry an econometric analysis abstract we studied the aggregate effect of actual air pollution regulation on co2 mitigation in china based on a theoretical framework of co benefits and the empirical evidence under the lens of the factor demand theory in economics different types of pollutants can be treated as different inputs in firms production functions and thus become complements or substitutes which well characterize the impact on one type of emissions from regulating the other type of emissions the spillover mechanisms can be decomposed into an output effect and a substitution effect with industry aggregate data of 18 manufacturing sectors from 1991 to 2010 we used the panel data models to estimate the complementarity or substitutability of two types of local air pollutants i e so2 and soot for co2 and the contributions of the output and the substitution effects in china we empirically found that co2 was a gross complement and a net substitute to so2 this means that more stringent regulation on so2 reduced the overall co2 emissions but it caused more co2 emissions when the output effect was eliminated in contrast we detected the conflict between the control of co2 and soot at the aggregate level by finding that co2 was both a gross and a net substitute to soot after 2006 due to the regulation improvement co2 became a net complement to so2 indicating the enhancement of technical synergy between so2 and co2 abatement while it remained a gross and a net substitute to soot the contrasting results for so2 and soot can be attributed to the different regulations on them so2 regulation provides a reference and model for regulating other air pollutants and for reaping the ancillary carbon benefits in china as china has announced the launch of the nationwide carbon market which will cap its total co2 emissions in 2017 based on our results so2 regulation will reduce the price of carbon permits due to the complementarity between so2 and co2

survival at the center the stability of minimum differentiation abstract we model a hotelling market with multidimensional product differentiation in an evolutionary framework both evolutionary stability in the sense of schaffer 1989 and stochastic stability following kandori et al 1993 young 1993 are analyzed it is shown that firms move towards the center in product space i e a principle of minimum differentiation on all dimensions of the product space applies

the long term impact of international migration on economic decision making evidence from a migration lottery and lab in the field experiments this paper studies how migration from a poor to a rich country affects key economic beliefs preference parameters and transnational household decision making efficiency the setting is the migration of tongans to new zealand through a migration lottery program in a 10 year follow up survey of individuals applying for this program the study elicited risk and time preferences and pro market beliefs it also linked migrants and potential migrants to a partner household consisting of family members who would stay behind if the migrants moved survey participants played lab in the field games designed to measure the degree of intra family trust and the efficiency of intra family decision making migration provides a large and permanent positive shock to income a large change in economic institutions and a reduction in interactions with partner household members despite these changes the study finds no significant impacts of migration on risk and time preferences pro market beliefs or the decision making efficiency of transnational households this stability in the face of such a large and life changing event lends credence to economic models of migration that treat these determinants of decision making as time invariant and contrasts with recent evidence on preference changes after negative shocks

training wages and sample selection estimating sharp bounds on treatment effects this paper empirically assesses the wage effects of the job corps program one of the largest federally funded job training programs in the u s even with the aid of a randomized experiment the impact of a training program on wages is difficult to study because of sample selection a pervasive problem in applied microeconometric research wage rates are only observed for those who are employed and employment status itself may be affected by the training program this paper develops an intuitive trimming procedure for bounding average treatment effects in the presence of sample selection in contrast to existing methods the procedure requires neither exclusion restrictions nor a bounded support for the outcome of interest identification results estimators and their asymptotic distribution are presented the bounds suggest that the program raised wages consistent with the notion that the job corps raises earnings by increasing human capital rather than solely through encouraging work the estimator is generally applicable to typical treatment evaluation problems in which there is nonrandom sample selection attrition copyright wiley blackwell

an illustration of the essential difference between individual and social learning and its consequences for computational analyses abstract drawing a conclusion from recent insights in evolutionary game theory we show that a so called spite effect implies that there is an essential difference between individual and social learning we illustrate its consequences for the choice of computational tools in economics and social settings in general by analyzing two variants of a genetic algorithm

wholesale pricing and evolutionarily stable strategies of retailers with imperfectly observable objective abstract this paper develops a one population indirect evolutionary game model of a supply chain with one manufacturer supplier and many a sufficiently large number of retailers to study how the retailer s marketing objective depends on the wholesale price its observability the error probability of the observed result on the rival s preference the market scale and the retailer s bargaining power this paper also presents an algorithm for computing the optimal wholesale price of the manufacturer we find that the profit revenue maximization behavior is an evolutionarily stable marketing strategy if the wholesale price is sufficiently high low given an appropriate wholesale price the revenue maximization behavior coexists with the profit maximization behavior in the retailers population the larger the market scale the stronger the motivation of the retailer to take profit maximization behavior due to a higher wholesale price the cross effects of the retailer s reservation payoff and the other factors should be considered in the decision process

imitators and optimizers in cournot oligopoly we analyze a symmetric n firm cournot oligopoly with a heterogeneous popu lation of optimizers and imitators imitators mimic the output decision of the most successful firms of the previous round a la vega redondo 1997 optimizers play a myopic best response to the opponents previous output firms are allowed to make mistakes and deviate from the decision rules with a small probability apply ing stochastic stability analysis we find that the long run distribution converges to a recurrent set of states in which imitators are better o than are optimizers this finding appears to be robust even when optimizers are more sophisticated it suggests that imitators drive optimizers out of the market contradicting a funda mental conjecture by friedman 1953

underinvestment in a profitable technology the case of seasonal migration in bangladesh hunger during pre harvest lean seasons is widespread in the agrarian areas of asia and sub saharan africa we randomly assign an 8 50 incentive to households in rural bangladesh to temporarily out migrate during the lean season the incentive induces 22 of households to send a seasonal migrant their consumption at the origin increases significantly and treated households are 8 10 percentage points more likely to re migrate 1 and 3 years after the incentive is removed these facts can be explained qualitatively by a model in which migration is risky mitigating risk requires individual specific learning and some migrants are sufficiently close to subsistence that failed migration is very costly we document evidence consistent with this model using heterogeneity analysis and additional experimental variation but calibrations with forward looking households that can save up to migrate suggest that it is difficult for the model to quantitatively match the data we conclude with extensions to the model that could provide a better quantitative accounting of the behavior

a new venture s optimal entry time abstract we formulate a model of the decision of when a new venture should enter the market based on the uncertain evolution over time of environmental volatility and market competition we characterize the performance maximizing time to enter the market and show how this entry time is affected by changes in the business environment by further focusing our modeling assumptions we are able to translate our time based criteria into environmental terms and propose that management set a target environment level that must be met before entering the market we also demonstrate that management should adjust this target over time to respond to changes in the business context this modeling feature is important because it allows for a better assessment of when to enter a market based on future performances we translate the model s theoretical insights into testable propositions and explore possible ways to operationalize these for empirical testing

modes of economizing behavior experimental evidence abstract in addition to more or less elaborate explicity rational procedures economic choices in reality are frequently made by trial and error imitation following an authority habit thoughtless impulse and hunch presenting results from a number of experiments that explicity incorporate decision cost this paper explores the extent to which these alternative decision making modes can lead to optimal choices

evolutionary stability and nash equilibrium in finite populations with an application to price competition abstract schaffer schaffer m e 1988 evolutionarily stable strategies for a finite population and a variable contest size journal of theoretical biololgy 132 469 478 proposed a concept of evolutionary stability for finite population models that has interesting implications in economic models of evolutionary learning since it is related to perfectly competitive equilibrium the present paper explores the relation of this concept to nash equilibrium in particular classes of games including constant sum games games with weak payoff externalities and games where imitative decision rules are individually improving an illustration of the latter is provided in the context of bertrand oligopoly with homogeneous product which allows for a characterization of the set of evolutionarily stable prices

the evolution of walrasian behavior consider an evolutionary context where a given number of quantity setting oligopolists tend to mimic successful behavior occasionally experimenting with some small probability in this context it is shown that the unique long run outcome of the process has all firms playing walrasian i e choosing an output that maximizes profits when taking the market clearing price as given

cournot competition imitation and information networks abstract we develop a stochastic learning model of cournot competition on arbitrary networks where firms can only observe local information and imitate the locally best the walrasian equilibrium is uniquely selected for any connected information network

beyond baseline and follow up the case for more t in experiments the vast majority of randomized experiments in economics rely on a single baseline and single follow up survey if multiple follow ups are conducted the reason is typically to examine the trajectory of impact effects so that in effect only one follow up round is being used to estimate each treatment effect of interest while such a design is suitable for study of highly autocorrelated and relatively precisely measured outcomes in the health and education domains this paper makes the case that it is unlikely to be optimal for measuring noisy and relatively less autocorrelated outcomes such as business profits household incomes and expenditures and episodic health outcomes taking multiple measurements of such outcomes at relatively short intervals allows the researcher to average out noise increasing power when the outcomes have low autocorrelation it can make sense to do no baseline at all moreover the author shows how for such outcomes more power can be achieved with multiple follow ups than allocating the same total sample size over a single follow up and baseline the analysis highlights the large gains in power from ancova rather than difference in differences when autocorrelations are low and a baseline is taken the paper discusses the issues involved in multiple measurements and makes recommendations for the design of experiments and related non experimental impact evaluations

us and them the origin of identity and its economic implications we investigate the origins of identity and the innate proclivity to draw a distinction between insiders and outsiders we propose an evolutionary explanation we argue that identity arises because it facilitates survival in an evolutionary setting we endogenize preferences and demonstrate that the evolutionarily stable preferences fashioned by natural selection would draw a distinction between insiders and outsiders we then work out the implications of such preferences in two contemporary scenarios one entailing rent seeking behavior and the other involving public good provision our results are in conformity with empirical evidence

a positive approach to non cooperative games abstract population steady states are defined for non cooperative games played repeatedly by individuals drawn from large populations these steady states balance the tendencies of immigration to an emigration from strategies according to certain simple measures of their relative performances approximate values for these steady states are computed for some examples and appear intuitively more plausible as descriptors of play than do nash equilibria

liberalising temporary movement of natural persons an agenda for the development round we discuss liberalising the temporary mobility of workers under mode 4 of the gats particularly the movement of medium and low skilled service providers between developing and developed countries such mobility potentially offers huge returns a flow equivalent to three per cent of developed countries skilled and unskilled work forces would generate an estimated increase in world welfare of over us 150 billion shared fairly equally between developing and developed countries the larger part of this emanates from the less skilled essentially because losing higher skilled workers cuts output in developing countries severely the mass migration of less skilled workers raises fears in developed countries for cultural identity problems of assimilation and the drain on the public purse these fears are hardly relevant to temporary movement however the biggest economic concern from temporary mobility is its competitive challenge to local less skilled workers but as populations age and the average levels of training and education rise developed countries will face an increasing scarcity of less skilled labour temporary mobility thus actually offers a strong communality of interest between developing and developed countries the remainder of the paper looks at the gats provisions on mode 4 and the commitments that have been made under it the paper reviews several official proposals for the doha talks including the very detailed one from india and considers several countries existing schemes for the temporary movement of foreign workers many countries have long had bilateral foreign worker programmes and some regional agreements provide for liberal and flexible movement these show what is feasible and how concerns can be overcome we caution that to be useful any wto agreement must increase mobility not just bureaucratise it the paper concludes with some modest and practical proposals we suggest inter alia that licensing firms to arrange the movement of labour is the most promising short term approach to increasing temporary mobility

welfare consequence of an asymmetric regulation in a mixed bertrand duopoly abstract i investigate an asymmetric duopoly where a public enterprise must supply the demand it faces while a private enterprise has no such obligation i show that such an asymmetric regulation yields the first best outcome walrasian equilibrium

returns to capital in microenterprises evidence from a field experiment small and informal firms account for a large share of employment in developing countries the rapid expansion of microfinance services is based on the belief that these firms have productive investment opportunities and can enjoy high returns to capital if given the opportunity however measuring the return to capital is complicated by unobserved factors such as entrepreneurial ability and demand shocks which are likely to be correlated with capital stock the authors use a randomized experiment to overcome this problem and to measure the return to capital for the average microenterprise in their sample regardless of whether they apply for credit they accomplish this by providing cash and equipment grants to small firms in sri lanka and measuring the increase in profits arising from this exogenous positive shock to capital stock after controlling for possible spillover effects the authors find the average real return to capital to be 5 7 percent a month substantially higher than the market interest rate they then examine the heterogeneity of treatment effects to explore whether missing credit markets or missing insurance markets are the most likely cause of the high returns returns are found to vary with entrepreneurial ability and with measures of other sources of cash within the household but not to vary with risk aversion or uncertainty

the economics of temporary migrations many migrations are temporary a fact that has often been ignored in the economic literature on migration such omission may be serious in that expected migration temporariness can impart a distinct dynamic element to immigrants economic behavior generating possible consequences for nonmigrants in both home and host countries in this paper we provide a thorough examination of the various aspects of temporary migrations that matter for the analysis of economic phenomena we demonstrate the extent of temporary migrations in population movements we show how temporariness can affect the various economic choices and how better data have improved both the measurement of nonpermanent migrations and the analyses of various aspects of migrant behavior we propose a general theoretical framework for modeling temporary migration decisions based on which we outline the various motives for temporariness while simultaneously reviewing related literature and available data sources we discuss the possible consequences of migration temporariness for nonmigrants in both home and host countries jel f22 f24 j11 j61 k37 o15

evolution in economic games abstract this paper examines the conditions under which evolutionary processes select equilibrium strategies of agents or firms under plausible dynamics optimal selection takes place provided that economic agents are small relative to the environment that is each such agent has a negligible effect on others payoffs however when this assumption is not met survival need not imply optimality examples in the contexts of bargaining bidding and market competition are presented

conspicuous by its absence ethics and managerial economics this paper gives prescriptions for introducing ethical concerns into the economic theory of the firm topics include social responsibility corporate governance profit maximization competition barriers collusion the market system and welfare economics the need for such prescriptions is based on a content analysis of 21 managerial economics texts for their coverage of ethics my analysis finds that substantive discussions of ethics are conspicuous by their absence as ethical breaches can involve significant monetary damages to a firm particularly through adverse market reactions moral reasoning abilities can complement analytical skills consequently my analysis demonstrates how ethics figure into the opportunity costs of managerial decision making which is central to the economic definition of profit

using weather variability to estimate the response of savings to transitory income in thailand this paper measures the extent to which farmers are able to use savings and dissavings to smooth consumption in response to unexpected shocks to income time series information on regional rainfall is used to construct estimates of transitory income due to rainfall shocks the relationship between these measures of transitory income and savings indicates that farm households save a significantly higher fraction of transitory income than nontransitory income jel d91 016 the incomes of farm households in developing countries are notorious for being both low and uncertain policies that increase the incomes of farmers may well be different

unilateral facilitation does not raise international labor migration from the philippines significant income gains from migrating from poorer to richer countries have motivated unilateral source country policies facilitating labor emigration however their effectiveness is unknown the authors conducted a large scale randomized experiment in the philippines testing the impact of unilaterally facilitating international labor migration the most intensive treatment doubled the rate of job offers but had no identifiable effect on international labor migration even the highest overseas job search rate that was induced 22 percent falls far short of the share initially expressing interest in migrating 34 percent the paper concludes that unilateral migration facilitation will at most induce a trickle not a flood of additional emigration

putting on a tight leash and levelling playing field an experiment in strategic obfuscation and consumer protection the paper reports the results of an experiment where asymmetric sellers of a product can obfuscate the market we show that policy measures may have unintended effects of increasing obfuscation incentives we find that policies that limit the effectiveness of obfuscation and policies that promote parity between firms can lead less prominent firms to increase their obfuscation efforts despite this unintended effect however the former type of policies is effective in boosting consumer welfare

ancillary benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in transitional economies abstract the paper presents the results of an ancillary benefits study in russia including the health benefits of reducing conventional pollutants as well as the economic benefits of saving fuel achieved by controlling greenhouse gas emissions we present illustrative examples of the ancillary benefits in the forestry sector our findings show that the benefits from conventional pollution reduction and savings in fuel are significant and institutional reforms are needed to capture them the aggregated approach using a crosscountry macroeconomic model contains some uncertainties but the assumptions required for our analysis did not compromise this study which is the first of its kind for russia

decentralized redistribution in a laboratory federation abstract the idea of laboratory federalism provides a strong argument in favor of fiscal decentralization it views autonomous jurisdictions in a federation as laboratories where new policies can be tested at low risk for the entire system if successful these policies will spread out by imitation otherwise they will be discarded studying this idea in a dynamic setting of fiscal competition we show that due to externalities between jurisdictions policies that appear successful and are therefore mimicked do not necessarily enhance welfare and vice versa specifically in the classical framework of decentralized rich to poor income redistribution with labor mobility the long run outcome entails a complete breakdown of redistribution with zero subsidies to the poor everywhere

evolution to equilibrium in an asymmetric oligopoly with differentiated goods abstract we present results on finite population evolutionarily stable strategies esss and stochastically stable states for a model of evolution with an imitative rule of strategy choice in an asymmetric oligopoly with differentiated goods and two groups of firms one group of low cost firms and one of high cost firms the firms play price setting and quantity setting oligopoly games under linear demand functions we will show that the stochastically stable state in a price setting oligopoly and that in a quantity setting oligopoly coincide

are profit maximisers the best survivors a darwinian model of economic natural selection abstract this paper demonstrates that the friedman conjecture that profit maximisation summarises appropriately the conditions for firm survival is not generally true if firms have market power profit maximisers are not necessarily the best survivors because of the possibility of spiteful behaviour of the following kind say a firm forgoes profit maximisation and thus decreases its survival chances but its deviation from maximisation harms its profit maximising competitors more than itself though the firm will be less likely to survive than it would if it maximised its profits it will still be more likely to survive than its competitors

energy consumption economic growth and carbon emissions challenges faced by an eu candidate member abstract this paper investigates the long run granger causality relationship between economic growth carbon dioxide emissions and energy consumption in turkey controlling for gross fixed capital formation and labor the most interesting result is that carbon emissions seem to granger cause energy consumption but the reverse is not true the lack of a long run causal link between income and emissions may be implying that to reduce carbon emissions turkey does not have to forgo economic growth

the development impact of a best practice seasonal worker policy seasonal migration programs are widely used around the world yet there is little evidence as to their development impacts a multiyear prospective evaluation of new zealand s recognised seasonal employer rse seasonal worker program allows us to measure the impact of participating in this program on households in tonga and vanuatu using a propensity score prescreened difference in differences analysis based on surveys fielded before during and after participation we find that the rse has indeed had positive development impacts that dwarf those of other popular development interventions it has increased income consumption and savings of households durable goods ownership and subjective standard of living the results also suggest that child schooling improved in tonga

migration and self protection against climate change a case study of samburu county kenya climate change will affect the livelihoods of pastoralists in arid and semi arid lands using data on agro pastoral households from northern kenya we explore whether migration of household members enhances adoption of agricultural innovations that aim to provide protection against weather shocks specifically we seek to test whether migration and adaptation are complementary mechanisms to protect the household against adverse shocks or whether they are substitutes do remittances relax capital constraints and facilitate the uptake of adaptive measures or do they render adaptation superfluous our data provide suggestive evidence that remittances from migrant household members may relax capital constraints and that remittances are an important mechanism linking migration to adoption enabling the uptake of new technologies that involve change in activities or high costs specifically migrant households adopt more adaptive measures promoting self protection and we document some support for the hypothesis that this is especially the case for high cost adaptations such as the purchasing of drought tolerant livestock these findings suggest that migration and local innovation are complementary rather than substitutive mechanisms of self protection for pastoral households in the semi arid lands of northern kenya households who have at least one member who has migrated are able to overcome barriers to employ high cost agricultural innovations through using remittances received thus enhancing their self protection against climate change related shocks