remittances from international migration a comparison of el salvador and nicaragua i use household data from el salvador and nicaragua to examine the determinants of remittances from international migration nearly twice as many households in san salvador the capital of el salvador receive remittances from relatives abroad than do households in managua the capital of nicaragua and of those who receive remittances the average remittances received in san salvador is over double that in managua 119 month to 45 month the difference is explained by differences in the behavioral coefficients and by differences in the self selection bias of those who remit out of the pool of emigrants between the two countries excerpt

hume s specie flow mechanism and classical monetary theory an alternative interpretation abstract hume s celebrated essay on the international distribution of money has always been criticized for ignoring the law of one price contrary to the traditional interpretation however hume actually maintains that law and argues for the stability of long run equilibrium putting money market equilibrium in the foreground his analysis is essentially founded on the same hypothesis as the modern monetary approach albeit focusing on the supply rather than on the demand side of the money market

banking in computable general equilibrium economies abstract in this paper we develop a computable general equilibrium economy that models the banking sector explicitly banks intermediate between households and between the household sector and the government sector households borrow from banks to finance their purchases of houses and they lend to banks to save for retirement banks pool households savings and they purchase interest bearing government debt and non interest bearing reserves we use this structure to answer two sets of questions one normative in nature that evaluates the welfare costs of alternative monetary and tax policies and one positive in nature that studies the real effects of following a procyclical interest rate policy rule

of a controversial passage in hume david hume s 1955 analysis of how a change in the quantity of money can have a temporary effect on real income has been variously interpreted and misinterpreted for over two hundred years a possible reason for some misinterpretation is hume s archaic use of the term labor with the correct interpretation which is consistent with hume s other theories and in particular his theory ofthe interest rate the reason for the temporary effect on real income is that prices lag behind money wages and a rise in real wages leads to an increased supply of effort copyright 1987 by university of chicago press

a brain gain with a brain drain abstract we study human capital depletion and formation in an economy open to out migration as opposed to an economy which is closed under the assumption of asymmetric information the enlarged opportunities and the associated different structure of incentives can give rise to a brain gain in conjunction with a brain drain migration by high skill members of its workforce notwithstanding the home country can end up with a higher average level of human capital per worker

consumers and the brain drain product and process design and the gains from emigration abstract we consider the welfare effects of skilled worker emigration in a context where skilled labor plays a role in product or process design we show such emigration can benefit the residents left behind even when consumers tastes exhibit a form of home bias this is because emigration improves the design of goods designed by skilled emigrants but consumed in the sending country in contrast to existing models of beneficial brain drain our results do not require agglomeration economies education related externalities remittances return migration or an emigration lottery instead they are driven purely by differences in market size that induce skilled emigrants to design better products or production processes abroad than at home

intergenerational redistribution with short lived governments we study the politics of intergenerational redistribution in an overlapping generations model with short lived governments the successive governments who care about the welfare of the currently living generations and possibly about campaign contributions are unable to pre commit the future course of redistributive taxation in a stationary politico economic equilibrium the intergenerational transfer in each period depends on the current value of the state variable and all expectations about future political outcomes are fulfilled we find that there exist multiple stationary equilibria in many political settings steady state welfare is often lower than it would be in the absence of redistributive politics

human capital depletion human capital formation and migration a blessing or a curse abstract we specify conditions under which a strictly positive probability of employment in a foreign country raises the level of human capital formed by optimizing workers in the home country while some workers migrate taking along more human capital than if they had migrated without factoring in the possibility of migration a form of brain drain other workers stay at home with more human capital than they would have formed in the absence of the possibility of migration a form of brain gain

immigration quotas and skill upgrading a reason why immigration policy is such a contended issue is that often immigrants end up obtaining the right to vote and hence may affect future policies this paper offers a dynamic general equilibrium model of immigration policy in each period a heterogeneously skilled population chooses an immigration policy by majority vote voters anticipate that immigration affects the skill premium and the skill composition of the electorate the main insight is the existence of a trade off between skill complementary immigration and the resulting shift in political power i argue that a reasonably parameterized version of the model is consistent with the main features of us immigration

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

brain drain and human capital formation in developing countries winners and losers using new data on emigration rates by education level we examine the impact of brain drain migration on human capital formation in developing countries we find evidence of a positive effect of skilled migration prospects on gross human capital formation in a cross section of 127 countries for each country of the sample we then estimate the net effect of the brain drain using counterfactual simulations countries combining relatively low levels of human capital and low emigration rates are shown to experience a beneficial brain drain and conversely there are more losers than winners and the former tend to lose relatively more than what the latter gain

intergenerational mobility and the political economy of immigration abstract flows of us immigrants are concentrated at the extremes of the skill distribution we develop a dynamic political economy model consistent with this observation individuals care about wages and the welfare of their children skill types are complementary in production voter support for immigration requires that the children of median voter natives and of immigrants have sufficiently dissimilar skills we estimate intergenerational transition matrices for skills as measured by education and find support for immigration at high and low skills but not in the middle in a version with guest worker programs voters prefer high skilled immigrants but low skilled guest workers

politico economic equilibrium and economic growth abstract we propose a notion of dynamic politico economic equilibrium which builds on two key assumptions policies are determined sequentially and agents are fully rational in their roles as both consumers and voters we examine a simple model of endogenous growth and infinitely lived agents where taxes on income are endogenous and where growth critically depends on the initial distribution of asset holdings we relate our equilibrium definition and results to existing literature on time consistency and on political economy and growth we show that our equilibria are time consistent and we argue that the choice of equilibrium concept might have important quantitative implications

diverging patterns with endogenous labor migration abstract the standard neoclassical model cannot explain persistent migration flows and lack of cross country convergence when capital and labor are mobile here we present a model where both phenomena may take place assuming increasing returns and perfect capital mobility the driving forces behind labor migration are the size and the composition of the workforce the size of the workforce produces divergence a larger workforce in one country implies higher wages the wage gap induces in migration and this makes the wage gap even larger in this case migration is only beneficial for the labor importing country the evolution in the composition of the workforce due to migration may have opposite effects in one case in migration keeps the wage of skilled workers high enough to induce people to qualify for skilled jobs this improves the composition of labor in the receiving country only and it makes divergence a likely outcome in another case labor migration keeps the relative wage of unskilled workers in the rich country high enough to induce all migrants to take unskilled jobs and reduce the skilled to unskilled ratio in that country then migration is beneficial to the country which was first exporting labor

education economic growth and brain drain abstract this paper constructs a two sector overlapping generations model of endogenous growth to study the effects of brain drain on growth education and income distribution it is shown that brain drain reduces the economic growth rate and generally hurts the non emigrants through the static income distributional effects and the dynamic damage on economic growth and human capital accumulation if the initial rate of human capital accumulation is relatively low brain drain could deteriorate both the sum of discounted income and lifetime discounted utility of a representative non emigrant the government can choose to spend more on education to lessen the detrimental growth effects of brain drain

optimal immigration education and growth in the long run abstract the paper extends manning s model on education and balanced growth to include labour immigration each immigration unit is assumed to consist of one skilled worker and some unskilled members the optimal immigration policy which maximizes the per capita steady state consumption of the host country is derived we show that optimal immigration policy can reduce the steady state skilled labour ratio more interesting still contrary to the widespread belief that immigration of skilled workers hurts local skilled workers it is the unskilled local workers whose interests are threatened by optimal immigration policy

migration with endogenous moving costs we study a dynamic model of labor migration in which moving costs decrease with the number of migrants already settled in the destination this assumption is supported by sociological studies of migrant networks with endogenous moving costs migration occurs gradually over time once it starts it develops momentum and migratory flows may increase even as wage differentials narrow in addition migration tends to follow geographical channels and low moving cost individuals migrate first these patterns are consistent with historical evidence from the great black migration of 1915 1960 in the united states much of which cannot be reconciled with existing migration models excerpt

brain drain and economic growth theory and evidence we focus on the impact of migration prospects on human capital formation and growth in a small open developing economy we assume that agents are heterogeneous in skills and take their educational decisions in a context of uncertainty regarding future migrations we distinguish two growth effects an ex ante brain effect migration prospects foster investments in education because of higher returns abroad and an ex post drain effect because of actual migration flows the case for a beneficial brain drain bbd emerges when the first effect dominates i e when the average level of human capital is higher in the economy opened to migrations than in the closed economy we derive the theoretical conditions required for such a possibility to be observed using cross section data for 37 developing countries we find that the possibility of a bbd could be more than a theoretical curiosity

bidding for brains intellectual property rights and the international migration of knowledge workers we introduce international mobility of knowledge workers into a model of nash equilibrium ipr policy choice among countries we show that governments have incentives to use iprs in a bidding war for global talent resulting in nash equilibrium iprs that can be too high rather than too low from a global welfare perspective these incentives become stronger as developing countries grow in size and wealth thus allowing them to prevent the poaching of their brains by larger wealthier markets

political equilibrium income distribution and growth this paper analyzes the impact of income distribution on growth when investment in human capital is the source of growth and individuals vote over the degree of redistribution in the economy the model has three main features first very different patterns of income distribution are conducive to high growth at different levels of per capita income second growth is associated with an externality whereby investment in human capital by one group increases the productivity of other groups thus potentially enabling them to invest in human capital third the initial pattern of income distribution and the resulting political equilibrium are crucial in determining whether the transmission of this externality is promoted in which case growth is enhanced or prevented in which case growth is stopped using a non overlapping generations model with voting i derive several empirical implications in particular the model implies an inverted u relation between levels of inequality and levels of income in cross sections but not necessarily in time series a result that seems consistent with a number of empirical studies

migration human capital accumulation and economic development we study how the possibility of migration changes the composition of human capital in sending countries and how this affects development in our model growth is driven by productivity growth which occurs via imitation or innovation both activities use the same types of skilled labour as input albeit with different intensities heterogenous agents accumulate skills in response to economic incentives migration distorts these incentives and the accumulation of human capital this slows down or even hinders economic development the effect is stronger the farther away the country is from the technological frontier

immigrant links to the home country empirical implications for u s bilateral trade flows immigrants ties to their home countries can play a key role in fostering bilateral trade linkages immigrant ties include knowledge of home country markets language preferences and business contacts that have the potential to decrease trading transaction costs empirical results for the united states suggest that immigrant links have historically been important in increasing bilateral trade flows with immigrants home countries copyright 1994 by mit press

testing the brain gain hypothesis micro evidence from cape verde abstract does emigration really drain human capital accumulation in origin countries this paper explores a unique household survey designed and conducted to answer this research question we analyze the case of cape verde a country with allegedly the highest brain drain in africa despite a marked record of income and human capital growth in recent decades we propose the first explicit test of brain drain arguments according to which the prospects of own future migration can positively impact educational attainment our most conservative estimates using individual specific variation in economic conditions at the destination indicate that a 10 pp increase in the probability of own future migration improves the probability of completing intermediate secondary schooling by nearly 4 pp for individuals who do not migrate before age 16 these findings are robust to the choice of instruments and econometric specification counterfactual simulations point to significant human capital gains from lowering migration barriers

can a brain drain be good for growth in the source economy this paper analyzes the interaction between income distribution human capital accumulation and migration it shows that when migration is not a certainty a brain drain may increase average productivity and equality in the source economy even though average productivity is a positive function of past average levels of human capital in an economy it is also shown how the temporary possibility of emigration may permanently increase the average level of productivity of an economy

brain drain and ldcs growth winners and losers we present an empirical evaluation of the growth e ects of the brain drain for the source countries of migrants using recent us data on migration rates by education levels carrington and detragiache 1998 we nd empirical support for the bene cial brain drain hypothesis in a sample of 50 developing countries at the country level we distinguish between winners and losers among source countries while the number of winners is smaller these include nearly 80 of the total population of developing countries jel classi cation f22 j24 o15

education democracy and growth abstract this note presents a model of endogenous growth where redistribution determined by a political equilibrium is in the form of public education it is shown that there need not be a negative relationship between growth and redistribution as public education increases the level of human capital in the conomy and at the same time tends to produce a more even income distribution

brain drain in globalization a general equilibrium analysis from the sending countries perspective according to the economic literature high skilled emigration may either harm or bene t developing economies recent research highlighted several positive and negative channels through which the brain drain operates this paper aims at evaluating the relative magnitudes of various brain drain channels and quantifying their global impact on migrants sending countries for this purpose we develop a 10 region general equilibrium model of the world economy characterized by overlapping generations dynamics our ndings suggest that the short run impact of brain drain on resident human capital is extremely crucial as it affects not only the number of high skilled workers available to domestic production but also the sending economy s capacity to innovate adopt modern technologies this latter effect is particularly important in globalization where capital investments are made in places with high production ef ciencies hence despite positive feedback effects those countries facing prevalent high skilled emigration are the most candid victims to brain drain

the present relevance of hume s open economy monetary dynamics david hume s monetary economics has remained a source of sustained controversy rival interpretations situate his work at the fountainhead of the quantity theory of money the monetary approach to the balance of payments and the post keynesian analysis of inflation recent contributions to the literature have explicitly modeled several aspects of his monetary writings but have not placed his controversial discussion of output and monetary dynamics within all open economy analysis this paper does so and contrasts rival specifications and interpretations of humean open economy output dynamics copyright 1995 by royal economic society

cantillon and hume on money and banking the foundations of two theoretical traditions the distinction between the classical monetary theory and quantity theory has been proposed in literature on money and banking the overall feature of the classical theory of money is that it holds one principle of regulation for each kind of issue metallic money bank issues and paper money whereas the quantity theory applied the causality and proportionality postulates for all kinds of monies without claiming to adjudicate the validity of such a distinction the paper investigates the foundation of each tradition in this respect this paper respectively examines and provides a survey of the secondary literature on cantillon s essai and the hume s discourses

globalization brain drain and development this paper reviews four decades of economics research on the brain drain with a focus on recent contributions and on development issues we first assess the magnitude intensity and determinants of the brain drain showing that brain drain or high skill migration is becoming a dominant pattern of international migration and a major aspect of globalization we then use a stylized growth model to analyze the various channels through which a brain drain affects the sending countries and review the evidence on these channels the recent empirical literature shows that high skill emigration need not deplete a country s human capital stock and can generate positive network externalities three case studies are also considered the african medical brain drain the exodus of european scientists to the united states and the role of the indian diaspora in the development of india s information technology sector we conclude with a discussion of the implications of the analysis for education immigration and international taxation policies in a global context

people flows in globalization the policy debate over globalization in the past decade has largely bypassed the international mobility of labor restrict trade and cries of protectionism resound suggest linking labor standards to trade and it s protectionism in disguise limit capital flows and the international monetary fund is on your back but restrict people flows that s just an accepted exercise of national sovereignty during the last few decades when most countries reduced barriers to trade in goods and services and liberalized financial capital markets most also sought to limit immigration in this essay i examine what we know about the causes and consequences of immigration i argue that people flows are fundamental to creating a global economy and that the interplay among immigration capital and trade is essential to understanding the way globalization affects economies i consider ways to reduce barriers to immigration that could improve the well being of workers around the world

migration of skilled workers policy interaction between host and source countries abstract we examine the interaction between policies of the host and source countries in the context of a model of skilled worker migration the host country aims to provide low cost labor for its employers while also taking into consideration the fiscal burden of providing social services to immigrants it optimizes by setting a time limit on the duration of a guest worker s permit the source country maximizes its net output by optimally choosing the amount of training provided to its citizens some of whom may migrate we solve for the nash and cooperative equilibrium values of the policy instruments

on the size of u s government political economy in the neoclassical growth model we study a dynamic version of meltzer and richard s median voter model of the size of government taxes are proportional to total income and they are redistributed as equal lump sum transfers voting takes place periodically over time and each consumer votes for the tax rate that maximizes his equilibrium utility we calibrate the model to u s data key elements in the calibration are the income and wealth distribution and the parameters governing the leisure and consumption choices the total size of transfers predicted by our political economy model is quite close to the size of transfers in the data

on the political economy of immigration the authors study how immigration policies that impose capital and skill requirements would be determined under majority voting when native agents differ in their wealth holdings and vote to maximize their income the results of the model calculations indicate that the native population will be polarized between those who would like an immigration policy to maximize the domestic capital labor ratio and those who would like an immigration policy that would minimize it

two way migration between similar countries we develop a model to explain two way migration of high skilled individuals between countries that are similar in their economic characteristics high skilled migration results from the combination of workers whose abilities are private knowledge and a production technology that gives incentives to firms for hiring workers of similar ability in the presence of migration cost high skilled workers self select into the group of migrants the laissez faire equilibrium features too much migration explained by a negative migration externality we also show that for sufficiently low levels of migration cost the optimal level of migration while smaller than in the laissez faire equilibrium is strictly positive finally we extend our model into different directions to capture stylised facts in the data and show that our baseline results also hold in these more complex modelling environments

international migration of educated manpower and social rates of return to education in ldcs the author examines the question of whether the emigration of educated manpower is beneficial or detrimental to countries of origin a dynamic model of human and non human capital accumulation in the presence of emigration opportunities is developed annotation

the effect of foreign direct investment on international migration does education matter using migration data in 1990 and 2000 we find that inward foreign direct investment fdi in non oecd countries affects the out migration of individuals with tertiary and secondary education to oecd countries originating the investments but has no significant effect on the out migration of individuals with primary education distinguishing between linkage and home effects our results show a dominant home effect of fdi for individuals with tertiary education but a stronger linkage effect for those with secondary education the existing stock of former migrants in foreign countries influences the out migration of individuals with primary education

vested interests in a positive theory of stagnation and growth we study a positive theory of stagnation and growth aimed at understanding the large variations in growth outcomes across actual economies the theory points to the fundamental role played by vested interests in determining policies which are key to the growth process some agents seek to prevent the adoption of new technologies we develop a model of technology adoption and show how technological innovation may sow the seeds of its own destruction in particular we find that the equilibrium is characterized by a long cycle of stagnation and growth over this cycle incumbents are phased out of the economy will new innovation occur in formalizing our theory we make a methodological contribution by characterizing dynamic voting equilibria when voters must forecast the effects of different current policies on future prices and policy outcomes

factor shares and savings in endogenous growth in models of steady investment driven growth an individual s propensity to save depends on how much of his income is drawn from accumulated factors of production capital rather than from nonaccumulated factors when agents are heterogeneous in this respect growth oriented policies have distributional consequences and in the absence of lump sum redistribution their implementation faces political constraints if the median voter is capital poor relative to the economy s representative agent political interactions tend to slow down growth when policy acts on capital s income share and tend to accelerate it when investment subsidies are the policy instrument of choice copyright 1993 by american economic association

the fiscal impact of high skilled emigration flows of indians to the u s abstract what are the fiscal consequences of high skilled emigration for source countries this paper develops methodologies for inferring these consequences and applies them to the recent sizable emigration of high skilled workers from india to the u s this wave of emigration from india to the u s is shown to be unusually concentrated amongst the prime age work force the highly educated and high earners in order to calculate the fiscal losses associated with these emigrants estimates of their counterfactual earnings distributions are generated using two distinct methods and integrated with a model of the indian fiscal system to calculate fiscal consequences conservative estimates indicate that the annual net fiscal impact to india of high skilled emigration to the u s is one half of 1 of gross national income or 2 5 of total fiscal revenues the sensitivity of these results to the method of predicting counterfactual incomes and the implications of these estimates for other developing countries is discussed in detail

the economic analysis of international migration a generalization this note examines and extends the following two propositions that finite international factor movements are beneficial to the nationals of the destination country but detrimental to those left behind in the source country and that marginal movements do not have such welfare effects using some newly developed techniques the propositions are found to be valid irrespective of the number of goods and factors if the economy starts from the autarky position when only one factor can flow the gain of the nationals loss of those left behind will be positively dependent upon the amount of inflow outflow however if goods trade and or factor flow are initially present the propositions are in general not true summary in fre excerpt

teachers growth and convergence this paper examines the role of individual instruction and teacher quality in determining economic growth and convergence across school districts the model shows that if teacher quality is more important for human capital accumulation than individual instruction human capital convergence will occur between two school districts this convergence arises because a poor school district hires relatively better teachers but uses them in larger classes in comparison with a rich school district the model is estimated on panel data of the states of the united states from 1882 to 1990 the estimates indicate that teacher quality is relatively more important for human capital accumulation than individual instruction the model accounts for all the mean growth in state per capita incomes and between 80 and 100 percent of convergence in state per capita incomes

networks in the modern economy mexican migrants in the u s labor market this paper attempts to identify job networks among mexican migrants in the u s labor market the empirical analysis uses data on migration patterns and labor market outcomes based on a sample of individuals belonging to multiple origin communities in mexico over a long period of time each community s network is measured by the proportion of the sampled individuals who are located at the destination the united states in any year we verify that the same individual is more likely to be employed and to hold a higher paying nonagricultural job when his network is exogenously larger by including individual fixed effects in the employment and occupation regressions and by using rainfall in the origin community as an instrument for the size of the network at the destination

an economic model of the brain drain asymmetric information in the labor market is discussed as a major cause of the exodus of foreign trained students from developing countries the authors suggest that employers in the country in which the students have been trained have a more accurate judgment of the true productivity of students than have employers in the students native country an illustrative numerical model is developed and its implications are analyzed annotation

david hume on banking and hoarding david hume opposes banks and favors hoarding the only bank he reluctantly approves of is a public 100 reserve bank other banks increase money supply and prices hindering exports and economic growth for hume a 100 reserve public bank would lead to the destruction of paper credit 1752 1985 p 285 fostering economic growth instead by preventing inflation additionally a 100 reserve bank hoards a large quantity of gold and silver which is available in case of national emergency

on the political economy of immigration and income redistribution in this article we analyze an economy in which agents vote over immigration policy and redistributive tax policy we show that natives preferences over immigration are influenced by the prospect that immigrants will be voting over future tax policy we also show that changes in the degree of international capital mobility the distribution of initial capital among natives the wealth or poverty of the immigrant pool and the future voting rights and entitlements of immigrants can have dramatic effects on equilibrium immigration and tax policies finally we provide some empirical support for the model s predictions