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

return migration uncertainty and precautionary savings this paper presents a life cycle model where migrants determine re migration and consumption simultaneously in a stochastic environment whether precautionary savings of migrants are above or below those of natives is ambiguous in general the sign depends on the risk in host and home country labor markets and on the correlation of labor market shocks furthermore the effect of an uncertain environment on migration and re migration plans cannot be unambiguously signed for the general case it depends on the size of the wage differential as well as the relative risk the migrant exhibits in the two labor markets

risk sharing and internal migration over the past two decades more than half the population in rural tanzania migrated within the country profoundly changing the nature of traditional institutions such as informal risk sharing mass internal migration has created geographically disperse networks on which the authors collected detailed panel data by quantifying how shocks and consumption co vary across linked households they show how migrants unilaterally insure their extended family members at home this finding contradicts risk sharing models based on reciprocity but is consistent with assistance driven by social norms migrants sacrifice 3 to 7 percent of their very substantial consumption growth to provide this insurance which seems too trivial to have any stifling effect on their growth through migration

extending a lifeline or cutting losses the effects of conflict on household receipts of remittances in pakistan summary i examine the causal effects of long term exposure to conflict measured at the micro level on households receipt of remittances among households residing in areas affected by the 2010 floods in pakistan using a dataset of 7802 households representative of all flood affected areas of pakistan in 2010 i employ iv estimation to overcome the endogeneity of conflict exposure and remittance receipts and control for a range of confounding factors i find that contrary to the literature from country level case studies long term exposure to conflict reduces households likelihood of receiving any remittances at all as well as the average amounts of remittances received however for households in the lowest food consumption expenditure quintile conflict has a positive effect on the likelihood of remittance receipts which provides evidence for the existence of heterogeneous effects as well as a significant micro macro gap in understanding the causal effects of conflict on remittance receipts

specific experience household structure and intergenerational transfers farm family land and labor arrangements in developing countries data from indian rural household survey was used to test th hypothesis that the coexistence in traditional rural societies of extended intergenerational families infrequent land sales and high reliance on family members as farm laborers is the result of the economic advantages which accrue from the knowledge gained by farming a particular ploy of land over a long period of time the land specific experience of elderly members of a intergenerational household who farmed the land as a child and then as an adult are expecially critical in adverse weather years most previous investigators attributed the existence of multigenerational households the use of family members rather than hired laboreds and the infrequency of land sales to deficiencies in the market i e labor market imperfections and an absence of capital insurance and asset markets in the present investigations these same characteristics are viewed as having an economic advantages a model for estimating the contribution of the experience of the elderly household members to agricultural profits was developed and applied to data from a 3 year panel study of 2900 indian rural farm households the data was collected between 1968 71 by the national council of applied economic research the survey collected information on farm profits farm inputs demographic characteristics and the effects of weather conditions on profits a major limitation of the study was a lack of information on the duration of land ownership age of household members was substituted as a proxy for duration of ownership findings were consistent withe the hypothesis in poor agricultural years gross returns for households which contained an elderly household member were greater than the gross returns for comparable households which did not contain an elderly member the economic advantages of specific knowledge embodied in the experienced elderly farmer were comparable to the economic advantages which accrued to households whose members were more educated the hypothesis cannot fully explain the existence of intergenerational families since there is a relatively large proportion of such families among nonfarm families in many countries including india findings suggest that intergenerational families may provide for more occupational diversity and thereby reduce income risks the specific experience hypothesis has policy implications if technological changes are introduced the value of specific experience may be lost and the frequency of intergenerational households may decline the hypothesis may also explain why farmers are reluctant to agree to land redistribution and consolidation schemes this reluctance may disappear after sufficient technological change has occurred

constant and variable returns to scale dea models for socially responsible investment funds abstract in order to evaluate the performance of socially responsible investment sri funds we propose some models which use data envelopment analysis dea and can be computed in all phases of the business cycle these models focus on the most crucial elements of an investment in mutual funds in the literature both constant and variable returns to scale dea models have been used to evaluate the performance of mutual funds we carry out an empirical investigation on european sri equity funds to test the presence of returns to scale rts another aspect taken into account by the empirical investigation is the measurement of the degree of social responsibility of sri equity funds in various european countries in addition we analyse the performance of the funds considered with the different dea models proposed which differ in the way the ethical objective is taken into account moreover the paper focuses on another crucial issue regarding socially responsible investing the comparison of the performances between sri and non sri funds the empirical study suggests that the ethical objective can be pursued without having to renounce financial rewards

marketed surplus under risk do peasants agree with sandmo using a newly defined notion of aversion to income risk the behavior of the marketed surplus producer under price risk is characterized unlike the familiar case first examined by sandmo output depends on both ordinal preferences for goods and on risk attitudes conditions are found that yield an output level under risk that is smaller than under certainty if these conditions do not hold both risk and risk aversion may have a positive effect on output implications for econometric studies of risk attitudes are considered and illustrated with an example finally we examine the effect of uncertainty on the peasant s long run equilibrium

economic welfare evaluations for producers under uncertainty the validity of producer and consumer surplus measures of firm welfare under risk is examined under constant absolute risk aversion and output price uncertainty only these measures are an exact measure of firm welfare as defined by compensating variation equivalent variation or the change in the certainty equivalent under decreasing absolute risk aversion qualitative comparisons of various measures are discussed for example producer s surplus as measured by the area above the uncompensated risk averse supply curve overstates the compensating variation of a change in expected price of output procedures for calculating firm welfare under production uncertainty and a variety of economic environments are proposed generally these procedures are applicable only when absolute risk aversion is constant

an equilibrium efficiency frontier data envelopment analysis approach for evaluating decision making units with fixed sum outputs abstract based on the minimal reduction strategy yang et al 2011 developed a fixed sum output data envelopment analysis fsodea approach to evaluate the performance of decision making units dmus with fixed sum outputs however in terms of such a strategy all dmus compete over fixed sum outputs with no memory that will result in differing efficient frontiers evaluations to address the problem in this study we propose an equilibrium efficiency frontier data envelopment analysis eefdea approach by which all dmus with fixed sum outputs can be evaluated based on a common platform or equilibrium efficient frontier the proposed approach can be divided into two stages stage 1 constructs a common evaluation platform via two strategies an extended minimal adjustment strategy and an equilibrium competition strategy the former ensures that original efficient dmus are still efficient guaranteeing the existence of a common evaluation platform the latter makes all dmus achieve a common equilibrium efficient frontier then based on the common equilibrium efficient frontier stage 2 evaluates all dmus with their original inputs and outputs finally we illustrate the proposed approach by using two numerical examples

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

migration remittances and the family remittances by migrants along with migration itself are elements in a migrant familys intertemporal contractual arrangement the reasons why the migrant and his family voluntarily enter into a mutually beneficial contractual arrangement with each other rather than with a 3rd party are discussed and the conditions under which the contractual arrangement is self enforcing are identified both parties can usually benefit from a number of pareto efficient mutual contractual arrangements this gives rise to an indeterminacy problem solved through a bargaining process between the parties who consequently converge to a contractual arrangement implying a specific flow of migrant to family remittances the chosen contractual arrangement reflects the relative bargaining powers of the parties and variables impinging upon these powers thus bear upon remittances in the light of these arguments tests are conducted on observed remittance behavior across individual migrants in botswana authors

portfolio performance evaluation in a mean variance skewness framework abstract astronomical amounts of money are being invested in financial markets consequently the evaluation of portfolio performance has created a great deal of interest among practitioners as well as academic researchers the literature suggests that portfolio efficiency based on mean variance skewness is more desirable than the one based on mean variance however there are no well established procedures to measure efficiency in this framework mainly due to the computational difficulties the aim of this paper is to develop a portfolio performance measure based on mean variance skewness framework by utilizing a non parametric efficiency analysis tool namely data envelopment analysis

resampling dea estimates of investment fund performance abstract data envelopment analysis dea is attractive for comparing investment funds because it handles different characteristics of fund distribution and gives a way to rank funds there is substantial literature applying dea to funds based on the time series of funds returns this article looks at the issue of uncertainty in the resulting dea efficiency estimates investigating consistency and bias it uses the bootstrap to develop stochastic dea models for funds derive confidence intervals and develop techniques to compare and rank funds and represent the ranking it investigates how to deal with autocorrelation in the time series and considers models that deal with correlation in the funds returns

a theory of remittances as an implicit family loan arrangement abstract the idea of an implicit and informal loan agreement between family members to explain migrants remittances is not new but its implications have not been fully explored in the theoretical literature many empirically testable propositions may be derived from this hypothesis when trying to explain why emigrants remit what the time profile of remittances is how it depends on the intent to stay on the expected length of stay and on interest rates what use people make of remittances and how the home family consumption behavior is affected by the economic prospects in the receiving country furthermore this theory yields many interesting policy prescriptions for less developed countries wishing to maximize the remittance flow from emigrants

asymmetric information about migrant earnings and remittance flows this paper examine asymmetric information about migrant earnings and its implications for remittance behavior using a sample of indian households with husbands working overseas in qatar on average wives underreport their husbands income and underreporting is more prevalent in households with higher earning migrants the discrepancy in earning reports is strongly correlated with variation in remittances greater underreporting by wives is associated with lower remittances an exchange model of remittances is developed with asymmetric information and costly state verification the optimal remittance contract prescribes a threshold for remittances that invites verification only if unmet the model s predictions closely match our empirical findings

efficiency of mutual funds and portfolio performance measurement a non parametric approach abstract in finance portfolio performance assessment is an important area of research the two popular indices of performance are the jensen s alpha and the sharpe index however there are a number of shortcomings of the above measures that have been highlighted in the literature we propose a new measure of performance that seeks to address the limitations of the earlier indices the new index is calculated by employing a well known method in operations research called data envelopment analysis we show the benefits of the proposed approach and assess the performance of mutual funds we compare the results with traditional indices of performance an interesting result we obtain is that the mutual funds are all approximately mean variance efficient

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

are international remittances altruism or insurance evidence from guyana using multiple migrant households abstract while international remittances provide significant disposable income for many households in less developed countries there is no consensus on migrants remittance motivation two principal competing explanations for remittances are altruism and risk sharing this paper employs previously unanalyzed data to bring new evidence to the debate we develop a simple theoretical model that yields distinct testable predictions for each motivation among the model s testable predictions is differential remittance behavior by migrants from households with multiple versus single migrants under altruism and risk sharing our estimation finds significant differences in remittance behavior of multiple and single migrants and these differences support the altruistic incentive to remit

motivations to remit evidence from botswana in this article a theory of motivations to send remittances is described and tested with data from botswana altruism is one of the motivations tested and found to be an insufficient explanation for remittances among migrants in botswana a refinement of the model stipulates a modified altruism or enlightened self interest in this model the relationship between the migrant and family is tempered by an implicit understanding of mutual benefit the household strategy may be to encourage some members to migrate as a means of spreading risk and sharing gains the household strategy is similar to an insurance policy where migration is to places where market potential is high the risks incurred might be high the example is given of migration during a drought in botswana migrant remittances were greater in households with more cattle or households with more to lose drought alone was not statistically related to remittances increases in remittances were related to increased levels of education it is suggested that repayment was the motive for parents investment in migrants education migrants gains are identified as the potential for an inheritance the security of channeling investments through a trusted family member and security in having a home to return to it is pointed out that the altruism and family remittances from urban migration were strategies that bridged the simple dynamic of either urban development or rural development impacting on family welfare it is suggested that household models of economy adopt some measure to express the relationship of household wealth to remittances from urban migrants

remittances and the changing composition of migration remittances are seen as a sustainable source of funding for developing countries during recent decades the level of remittances has increased dramatically and the recent financial crisis has scarcely affected the trend in the same period the structure of international migration flows has changed these flows are now characterised by a growing feminisation and by increasing skill levels in this article we establish a link between these two facts and assess the effect of the change in the structure of migration on the level of remittances we use a recent data set on bilateral remittances and estimate a gravity model in which the gender and education background of migration flows are accounted for we find that remittances are positively associated with the share of female and college educated migrants in particular we argue that the rising share of college educated women has had a significant impact on the increase in remittances

frontier based vs traditional mutual fund ratings a first backtesting analysis we explore the potential benefits of a series of existing and new non parametric convex and non convex frontier based fund rating models to summarize the information contained in the moments of the mutual fund price series limiting ourselves to the traditional mean variance portfolio setting we test in a simple backtesting setup whether these efficiency measures fare any better than more traditional financial performance measures in selecting promising investment opportunities the evidence points to a remarkable superior performance of these frontier models compared to most but not all traditional financial performance measures

remittances and savings from international migration theory and evidence using a matched sample abstract the central question of this paper concerns the implications of remittance flows for migrants and their origin households in the country of origin this paper represents the first attempt to present a disaggregated view of international remittance flows using a matched sample of international migrants and their origin families i investigate two types of remittances transfers to the home family and savings in the country of origin the empirical evidence provides support for the altruistic model of transfer behavior wealthier origin families tend to receive lower transfers other things being equal however remittances sent to finance origin country investments are positively associated with origin household wealth the estimation strategy addresses two common problems that arise in investigating remittance behavior omitted variable bias and the measurement of origin household resources

labour on the family farm a theory under uncertainty an extension abstract in a framework developed by p j dawson the effects of output price risk on the family labour supply and its demand for hired labour are investigated in particular the effects of changes in autonomous income expected output price family composition and farm size are studied comparative statics is used to sign these effects revealing the importance of the behavior of the measures of absolute relative and partial risk aversion in determining them it is shown that some of the effects may be determined only via empirical research

do international migration and remittances reduce poverty in developing countries summary few studies have examined the impact of international migration and remittances on poverty in the developing world this paper fills this lacuna by constructing and analyzing a new data set on international migration remittances inequality and poverty from 71 developing countries the results show that both international migration and remittances significantly reduce the level depth and severity of poverty in the developing world after instrumenting for the possible endogeneity of international migration and controlling for various factors results suggest that on average a 10 increase in the share of international migrants in a country s population will lead to a 2 1 decline in the share of people living on less than 1 00 per person per day after instrumenting for the possible endogeneity of international remittances a similar 10 increase in per capita official international remittances will lead to a 3 5 decline in the share of people living in poverty

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

data envelopment analysis of mutual funds based on second order stochastic dominance abstract although data envelopment analysis dea has been extensively used to assess the performance of mutual funds mf most of the approaches overestimate the risk associated to the endogenous benchmark portfolio this is because in the conventional dea technology the risk of the target portfolio is computed as a linear combination of the risk of the assessed mf this neglects the important effects of portfolio diversification other approaches based on mean variance or mean variance skewness are non linear we propose to combine dea with stochastic dominance criteria thus in this paper six distinct dea like linear programming lp models are proposed for computing relative efficiency scores consistent in the sense of necessity with second order stochastic dominance ssd the aim is that being ssd efficient the obtained target portfolio should be an optimal benchmark for any rational risk averse investor the proposed models are compared with several related approaches from the literature

remittances deteriorate governance abstract i use a natural experiment of oil price driven remittance flows to poor non oil producing muslim countries to demonstrate that remittances deteriorate the quality of governance especially in countries with weak democratic institutions the results indicate that a 1 standard deviation increase in remittances raises corruption by 1 5 index points on a 6 point scale which is equivalent to a dollar 600 decrease in per capita gdp concomitantly remittances may enable governments to reduce their delivery of public services for example health care school enrollment the results suggest that political institutions may mediate the potentially beneficial socioeconomic effects of remittance inflows

native internal migration and the labor market impact of immigration this paper presents a theoretical and empirical study of how immigration influences the joint determination of the wage structure and internal migration behavior for native born workers in local labor markets using data from the 1960 2000 decennial censuses the study shows that immigration is associated with lower in migration rates higher out migration rates and a decline in the growth rate of the native workforce the native migration response attenuates the measured impact of immigration on wages in a local labor market by 40 to 60 per cent depending on whether the labor market is defined at the state or metropolitan area level

remittances and the wage impact of immigration this paper examines how the outflow of remittances affect the wages of native workers the model shows that the wage impact of immigration depends on the competing effects of an increase in labor market competition and an increase in the consumer base immigrant remittances provide a unique way of isolating this latter effect because they reduce the consumer base but not the workforce the predictions of the model are tested using an unusually rich german data set that has detailed information on remittances and wages as expected the results indicate that a 1 percent increase in remittances depress the wages of native workers by 0 06 percent furthermore remittances predominantly affect workers in nontraded industries that are more reliant on domestic consumption

international migration remittances and household investment evidence from philippine migrants exchange rate shocks how do households respond to overseas members economic shocks overseas filipinos in dozens of countries experienced sudden heterogeneous changes in exchange rates during the 1997 asian financial crisis appreciation of a migrant s currency against the philippine peso leads to increases in household remittances from overseas the estimated elasticity of philippine peso remittances with respect to the exchange rate is 0 60 positive migrant shocks lead to enhanced human capital accumulation and entrepreneurship in origin households child schooling and educational expenditure rise while child labour falls households also work more hours in self employment and become more likely to start relatively capital intensive household enterprises

not just a work permit eu citizenship and the consumption behavior of documented and undocumented immigrants this paper explores the impact of the 2007 european union enlargement on the consumption behavior of immigrant households using data from a unique italian survey and a difference in differences approach we find that the enlargement induced a significant consumption increase for the immigrant households from new member states both in the short and in the medium run this enlargement effect cannot be attributed to the mere legalization as it concerns both undocumented and documented immigrants albeit through different channels detailed information on immigrants legal status undocumented documented and sector of employment informal formal allows us to shed light on the exact mechanisms following the enlargement previously undocumented immigrants experienced an increase in the labor income by moving from the informal towards the formal economy whereas immigrants who were already working legally in italy benefitted from the increased probability of getting a permanent contract enhanced employment stability in turn reduced the uncertainty about future labor income leading to an increase in documented immigrants consumption expenditure

labour on the family farm a theory under uncertainty abstract this paper develops a theory of the family farm in conditions of uncertainty where attention is focussed on the labour input decisions specifically the farm family is faced with two labour decisions namely with respect to hired labour and to family labour the framework for analysis is expected utility maximisation the analysis has implications for agricultural policy since policy pronouncements of economists are typically based on models which assume perfect certainty these pronouncements do not survive the incorporation of uncertainty

stochastic dominance and expected utility survey and analysis while stochastic dominance has been employed in various forms as early as 1932 it has only been since 1969 1970 that the notion has been developed and extensively employed in the area of economics finance agriculture statistics marketing and operations research in this survey the first second and third order stochastic dominance rules are discussed with an emphasis on the development in the area since the 1980s

the effect of low skilled immigration on u s prices evidence from cpi data i exploit the large variation across u s cities and through time in the relative size of the low skilled immigrant population to estimate the causal effect of immigration on prices of nontraded goods and services using an instrumental variables strategy i find that at current immigration levels a 10 percent increase in the share of low skilled immigrants in the labor force decreases the price of immigrant intensive services such as housekeeping and gardening by 2 percent wage equations suggest that lower wages are a likely channel through which these effects take place however wage effects are significantly larger for low skilled immigrants than for low skilled natives implying that the two are imperfect substitutes

motives for private transfers over the life cycle an analytical framework and evidence for peru abstract this paper tests for the motives for private income transfers we consider two motives altruism and exchange the question of private transfer motives is important because such motivation can influence the effects of public income transfers on the distribution of income using a household survey for peru we find that transfer amounts received increase with recipient pre transfer income which contradicts a key prediction of the strong form of the altruism hypothesis but is consistent with exchange we also find that capital market imperfections are likely to be an important cause of private transfers and that social security benefits crowd out the incidence of private transfers

determinants of remittances the case of the south asian community in manchester this paper investigates the remittance behaviour of the south asian community using new data from indian pakistani and bangladeshi households in manchester the findings show that standard variables such as income employment education linkages to the home country and host country are important determinants of remittances although remittances are sent mainly for consumption purposes those sent for land acquisition and savings have stronger association with the amount of remittances in addition we find strong evidence for the remittance decay hypothesis for indian and pakistani migrants but not for bangladeshi migrants

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

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

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

broken symmetry symmetry and price uncertainty or short and long run comparative statics of the competitive firm abstract the notion of broken or hidden symmetry is applied to a long run characterization of a competitive firm operating under price uncertainty the main result of the paper is the restoration of a slutsky type symmetry of the input demand functions within an expected utility framework which does not involve any assumption about risk aversion a second conclusion is that economic relations expressed in terms of relative quantities are essential in the long run comparative statics under price uncertainty

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

migration remittances and male and female employment patterns little is known about the labor market impacts of workers remittances despite their magnitude in countries with considerable outmigration reports that families receiving international remittances severely curtail their work efforts are fairly common in the popular press e g robert frank 2001 yet we lack rigorous analyses of how male and female labor supplies respond to increases in remittance income to either support or refute these anecdotal observations according to the neoclassical model of labor leisure choice mark r killingsworth 1983 remittances a source of nonlabor income may lift budget constraints raise reservation wages and through an income effect reduce the employment likelihood and hours worked by remittance receiving individuals the receipt of remittances is usually preceded by the out migration of working aged household members however which may induce changes in the labor supply of nonmigrating household members in order to compensate for forgone income or to defray migration related expenses distinguishing the disruptive effect from the income effect of remittance inflows is problematic as most surveys do not contain detailed information on household outmigration and remittance receipt to the extent that these two effects are expected to have opposite impacts on labor supply however we can assess which effect dominates the impact of remittances on the decision to work has been previously examined by edgard rodriguez and erwin r tiongson 2001 in manila and by edward funkhouser 1992 in managua without accounting for the endogeneity of remittances with respect to labor supply they conclude that remittances reduce employment funkhouser also finds that remittances slightly increase self employment while informative these studies focus on the decision to work and do not consider that without altering employment rates remittances may change the hours worked and or the type of work performed in the receiving economy furthermore the impact may be different on male and female labor supplies and responsiveness to remittance income may vary from rural to urban areas using data from mexico a country with a large and growing remittance inflow we address the following questions how does the employment status and hours worked by men and women vary owing to international remittances do male and female labor supplies differ across various types of employment in rural versus urban areas due to higher remittance inflows

a two season agricultural household model of output and price uncertainty abstract this paper presents a two season model of a household s production consumption labor supply and storage decisions in an environment of output and price risk the analytical results in this study are markedly different from those of models prevalent in the mainstream of the agricultural household literature the empirical analysis that uses panel data from a village in india provides support for the theoretical results and underscores the seasonal dimension of the farmers choice problems the results also show that ignoring risk or risk averse preferences may introduce substantial downward bias in optimal response estimates

the labor market impact of immigration in western germany in the 1990 s in this article we estimate the wage and employment effects of recent immigration in western germany using administrative data for the period 1987 2001 and a labor market equilibrium model we find that the substantial immigration of the 1990s had very little adverse effects on native wages and on their employment levels instead it had a sizeable adverse employment effect on previous immigrants as well as a small adverse effect on their wages these asymmetric results are partly driven by a higher degree of substitution between old and new immigrants in the labor market and in part by the rigidity of wages in less than flexible labor markets in a simple counter factual experiment we show that in a world of perfect wage flexibility and no unemployment insurance the wage bill loss of old immigrants would be much smaller

diversification consistent data envelopment analysis with general deviation measures abstract we propose new efficiency tests which are based on traditional dea models and take into account portfolio diversification the goal is to identify the investment opportunities that perform well without specifying our attitude to risk we use general deviation measures as the inputs and return measures as the outputs we discuss the choice of the set of investment opportunities including portfolios with limited number of assets we compare the optimal values efficiency scores of all proposed tests leading to the relations between the sets of efficient opportunities strength of the tests is then discussed we test the efficiency of 25 world financial indices using new dea models with cvar deviation measures

motives for private income transfers private income transfers are becoming increasingly recognized as a key aspect of the u s economy the majority of private income transfers occur inter vivos i e between living persons but very little is known about this type of transfer behavior this paper tests alternative hypotheses concerning motivation for inter vivos transfers two motives are considered altruism and exchange evidence presented here casts doubt on the altruistic model of transfer behavior observed patterns for inter vivos transfers are more consistent with exchange related motives this finding has important implications for the effects of public transfer programs on the distribution of economic well being

cultural determinants of household saving behavior relying on the epidemiological approach we show that culture is a significant driver of household saving behavior second generation immigrants from countries that put strong emphasis on thrift or wealth accumulation tend to save more in germany we confirm these results in data from the uk by linking parents to their children we show that these two cultural components affect the saving behavior of both first generation immigrants and their children and also provide suggestive evidence that long term orientation is related to saving behavior through the intergenerational transmission of language

dea frontier improvement and portfolio rebalancing an application of china mutual funds on considering sustainability information disclosure abstract data envelopment analysis dea has been a widely used methodology for evaluating the relative performance of portfolios extensive work has appeared for realizing the role of dea in the aspect of assessing portfolio performance and deriving the relative rankings however the role of providing realizable benchmarks is not fully explored in the existing literatures most importantly the dea based portfolio performance evaluation methods developed in the existing literatures can hardly provide support for fund managers in pursuing sustainability performance in this paper we first propose a dea frontier improvement approach under the mean variance framework this approach provides investor with a rebalancing strategy as well as an improved dea frontier which approximates the portfolio efficient frontier better than the traditional dea model does then this approach is extended to a general return risk framework our in sample simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach for a wide range of applications in addition the out of sample tests show that the rebalancing investment strategies can achieve higher sharpe ratios and sortino ratios than those of the original ones finally we apply the proposed approach to evaluate mutual fund performance in china with the consideration of sustainability information disclosure we construct a disclosure index to indicate the extent of sustainable information disclosure of each mutual fund the results show that the proposed approach provides not only investment recommendations but also references for constructing sustainable green funds

separability and risk in the static household production model the household production model highlights the possible interdependence of consumption and production decisions in the farm household the structure of this interdependence significantly affects the analytics both theoretical and econometric of farm households singh squire and straus 20 have an excellent discussion of this interdependence and its methodological implications a particular type of interdependence called interchangeably recursiveness or separability allows production decisions to be made independently of consumption decisions although the latter depends on the former through the budget constraint this separability is of interest because it justifies a large number of well developed methodological approaches in farm household studies among these being the various duality theory approaches sasaki and maruyama 19 and jorgenson and lau 10 both and independently found the existence of perfectly competitive goods and factor markets to be sufficient for the existence of separability under deterministic conditions while there are a large number of things that can upset this result even in the deterministic setting e g nonhomogeneity of labor as in kuroda and yotopoulos 13 and lopez 14 the recognition of the role of risk appears especially threatening to separability even in a competitive setting as pointed out by barnum and squire 1 if contingent claims markets exist or if households are risk neutral separability exists under risk situations but insurance markets may not exist and for many risks faced by the farming households could not unless heavily subsidized exist furthermore households have been variously shown to be risk averse 15 7 4 roe and graham tomasi 18 utilizing a multiplicative yield risk in the context of a dynamic model concluded that on the whole independence does not hold and estimating equations from certainty theory are not appropriate thus with respect to risk one can say that the die is loaded against separability this paper aims to show that there are risk specifications which allow separability for the household production model even in the absence of the contingent claims market in section ii we introduce the standard model of the household with commercial production it involves a household that produces an output which it partly consumes and partly sells in the market risk enters the revenue function either additively or multiplicatively we then introduce two definitions of separability in the sense of efficiency and in the sense of elasticity we show in section ii that additive risk whether on yield or on monetary revenue allows sepa

empirical estimation and use of risk preferences an appraisal of estimation methods that use actual economic decisions the topic addressed in this paper concerns the conceptual basis estimation procedures and resources required for implementation of methods for estimating risk preferences by observing behavior an attempt is made to review and appraise previous literature as well as to explore some alternative approaches to begin it is important to contrast four general types of empirical settings of interest these are micro farm level macro market or other aggregations descriptive positivistic and prescriptive normative studies the prescriptive or conditionally normative studies seemingly have dominated agricultural economic studies of risk these generally have been micro in nature and have focused on

is the new immigration really so bad this article reviews the recent evidence on us immigration focusing on two key questions 1 does immigration reduce the labour market opportunities of less skilled natives 2 have immigrants who arrived after the 1965 immigration reform act been successfully assimilated overall evidence that immigrants have harmed the opportunities of less educated natives is scant on the question of assimilation the success of the us born children of immigrants is a key yardstick by this metric post 1965 immigrants are doing reasonably well even children of the least educated immigrant origin groups have closed most of the education gap with the children of natives

endogeneity and sample selection in a model for remittances abstract we estimate a remittance model in which we address endogeneity and reverse causality relationships between immigrants remittances pre transfer income and consumption in order to take into account the fact that a large share of individuals do not remit instrumental variable variants of the double hurdle and heckit selection models are proposed and estimated by limited information ml semiparametric extensions are considered as robustness checks our results for a sample of recent immigrants to australia show that endogeneity is substantial and that estimates obtained by the methods previously employed in the literature may be misleading if given a behavioral interpretation

remittances and temporary migration in this paper we study the remittance behavior of immigrants and how it relates to temporary versus permanent migration plans we use a unique data source that provides unusual detail on remittances and return plans and follows the same household over time our data allows us also to distinguish between different purposes of remittances we analyze the association between individual and household characteristics and the geographic location of the family as well as return plans and remittances the panel nature of our data allows us to condition on household fixed effects to address measurement error and reverse causality we use an instrumental variable estimator our results show that changes in return plans are related to large changes in remittance flows

compensated optimal response under uncertainty in agricultural household models abstract this study derives the qualitative properties of a household s optimal consumption family labour hired labour and non labour input choices under price and or output risk through a slutsky type compensation without imposing any restriction on risk preference structure or production technology these compensated responses provide the underpinning for welfare analysis in agricultural household models under risk the framework for the evaluation of welfare effects of product and factor price interventions in a setting of output and price risk is developed the paper also outlines an empirical model for estimation of the compensated demand and supply responses and for validation of the paper s analytical results

stochastic dominance and expected utility while stochastic dominance has been employed in various forms as early as 1932 it has only been since 1969 1970 that the notion has been developed and extensively employed in the area of economics

the influence of remittances on education and health outcomes a cross country study we study the effect of international remittances on aggregate educational and health outcomes using a sample of 69 low and middle income countries we find that remittances play an important role in improving primary and secondary school attainment increasing life expectancy and reducing infant mortality our results suggest that as migration laws continue to support greater emigration and remittances policies should be enacted to facilitate the flow of remittances as they represent a significant source for economic development

data envelopment analysis models of investment funds abstract this paper develops theory missing in the sizable literature that uses data envelopment analysis to construct return risk ratios for investment funds it explores the production possibility set of the investment funds to identify an appropriate form of returns to scale it discusses what risk and return measures can justifiably be combined and how to deal with negative risks and identifies suitable sets of measures it identifies the problems of failing to deal with diversification and develops an iterative approximation procedure to deal with it it identifies relationships between diversification coherent measures of risk and stochastic dominance it shows how the iterative procedure makes a practical difference using monthly returns of 30 hedge funds over the same time period it discusses possible shortcomings of the procedure and offers directions for future research

portfolio selection in multidimensional general and partial moment space abstract this paper develops a general approach for the single period portfolio optimization problem in a multidimensional general and partial moment space a shortage function is defined that looks for possible increases in odd moments and decreases in even moments a main result is that this shortage function ensures sufficient conditions for global optimality it also forms a natural basis for developing tests on the influence of additional moments furthermore a link is made with an approximation of an arbitrary order of a general indirect utility function this non parametric efficiency measurement framework permits to differentiate mainly between portfolio efficiency and allocative efficiency finally information can in principle be inferred about the revealed risk aversion prudence temperance and other higher order risk characteristics of investors

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

do immigrant inflows lead to native outflows we use 1980 and 1990 census data for 119 larger metropolitan statistical areas to examine the effect of skill group specific immigrant inflows on the location decisions of natives in the same skill group and on the overall distribution of human capital to control for unobserved skill group specific demand factors our models include lagged mobility flows of natives over the 1970 80 period we also estimate instrumental variables models that use the fraction of mexican immigrants in 1970 to predict skill group specific relative immigrant inflows over the 1980s despite wide variation across cities in the size and relative skill composition of immigrant population changes we find no evidence of selective out migration by natives we conclude that immigrant inflows exert a direct effect on the relative skill composition of cities cities that have received relatively unskilled immigrant flows have experienced proportional rises in the size of their unskilled populations this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

remitting behaviour of turkish migrants evidence from household data in germany this paper provides an empirical analysis of the remittances of turkish migrants using novel data from 589 households in berlin which holds the largest turkish community outside turkey the findings suggest that the remittances of turkish migrants are determined mainly by a combination of self interest and tempered altruism comparison of migrant groups who do and do not intend to return to turkey shows that those intending to return remit mostly for self interest and remit larger amounts while those with no such intention remit mainly due to implicit loan agreement within the family there is no evidence of pure altruism in any of the samples in addition remitters are more likely to increase the amount of remittances where they are to be spent on education and investment the same relationship does not hold for basic needs

fishing and nonfishing income decisions the role of human capital and family structure resource dependent households often diversify their income we model demand for remittances and supply of off resource labor as a joint decision and discuss household trade offs we extend the off farm labor supply literature to a rural fishery contrasting our results to common findings in the farm literature and providing empirical evidence of the interdependence between education and family structure in determining income diversification using a unique dataset from malaysia we find that more educated households are less likely to diversify their income with caveats depending on family composition policy implications for resource management in a remittance economy with alternative livelihoods are discussed