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

two interval inventory allocation policies in a one warehouse n identical retailer distribution system for a system of n identical retailers we construct a model for determining warehouse inventory allocation policies which minimize system lost sales per retailer between system replenishments an allocation policy is specified by a the number of withdrawals from warehouse stock b the intervals between successive withdrawals c the quantity of stock to be withdrawn from the warehouse in each interval and d the division of withdrawn stock among the retailers we show that in the case of two withdrawals available stock in each interval should be divided to balance retailer inventories we also develop an infinite retailer model and use it to determine two interval allocation heuristics for n retailer systems simulation tests suggest that the infinite retailer heuristic policies are near optimal for as few as two retailers simulation tests indicate that the risk pooling benefits of allocation policies with two well chosen intervals are comparable to those of base stock policies with four equal intervals

serial supply chains with economies of scale bounds and approximations we consider two models of stochastic serial inventory systems with economies of scale for which the forms of optimal policies are known in the first model each stage has a fixed order quantity while in the second model there is a fixed order cost for external supplies for each model we show that the optimal policy parameters can be bounded and approximated by a series of independent single stage optimal policy parameters we further construct closed form bounds and approximations for the single stage solutions and apply them to the serial systems these results provide simple and effective solutions that will help to facilitate implementations in practice they also allow us to see the connections between the serial and single stage systems and sharpen our intuition on optimal policy parameters and system behavior

evaluation of stock allocation policies in a divergent inventory system with shipment consolidation in this paper we consider a one warehouse n retailer inventory system characterized by access to real time point of sale data and a time based dispatching and shipment consolidation policy at the warehouse more precisely inventory is reviewed continuously while a consolidated shipment for example a truck to all retailers is dispatched from the warehouse at regular time intervals the focus is on investigating the cost benefits of using state dependent myopic allocation policies instead of a simple fcfs first come first serve rule to allocate shipped goods to the retailers the analysis aims to shed some light on when if ever fcfs is a reasonable policy to use in this type of system the fcfs allocations of items to retailers are determined by the sequence in which retailer orders or equivalently customer demands arrive to the warehouse applying the myopic policy enables the warehouse to postpone the allocation decision to the moment of shipment from the warehouse or the moments of delivery to the different retailers and to base it on the inventory information available at those times the myopic allocation method we study is often used in the literature on periodic review systems

sharing norm pressures and community remittances evidence from a natural disaster in the pacific islands abstractmigrants are often subject to social pressures to remit beyond their own households to share the benefits of migration with the wider community in their home country these are community remittances we hypothesise that community sharing norm pressures are stronger in locations with more extensive home community networks we also postulate that the responsiveness of remittances to sharing pressures is subject to diminishing returns attributable to a donor fatigue effect using customised survey data from three polynesian migrant groups in metropolitan and regional australia we estimate double hurdle regression models of community remittances to identify the effects of sharing norm pressures we exploit an exogenous cyclone shock to home country incomes affecting one sub group we find strong evidence in support of the postulated responsiveness of community remittances to location related differences in sharing norm pressures and the presence of a donor fatigue effect the policy implicatio

inter vivos transfers and intergenerational exchange the surge of interest in intergenerational transfers in the past decade has sparked a debate over the motivation for them are transfers given out of altruism or part of an exchange while each motive is probably at work to some extent we know little about whether one motive predominates the question is relevant for issues concerning public income redistribution and inequality in the family but despite its importance empirical evidence about motives is scarce because of limited data we investigate a new data set the national survey of families and households which remedies many of the shortcomings of other data sets containing private transfer information we find that empirical patterns for inter vivos transfers i e transfers between living persons are more consistent with exchange than altruism

exact evaluation of batch ordering inventory policies in two echelon supply chains with periodic review this paper studies a two echelon supply chain with stochastic and discrete consumer demand batch order quantities periodic inventory review and deterministic transportation times reorder point policies manage inventories at every location average inventory backorders and fill rates are evaluated exactly for each location safety stock is evaluated exactly at the lower echelon and a good approximation is detailed for the upper echelon numerical data are presented to demonstrate the model s utility it is found that system costs generally increase substantially if the upper echelon is restricted to carry no inventory of if the upper echelon is required to provide a high fill rate in many cases it is optimal to set the upper echelon s reorder point to yield near zero safety stock yet in some cases this simple heuristic can significantly increase supply chain operating costs finally policies selected under the assumption of continuous inventory review can perform poorly if implemented in an environment with periodic review

a global assessment of human capital mobility the role of non oecd destinations discussions of high skilled mobility typically evoke migration patterns from poorer to wealthier countries which ignore movements to and between developing countries this paper presents for the first time a global overview of human capital mobility through bilateral migration stocks by gender and education in 1990 and 2000 and calculation of nuanced brain drain indicators building on newly collated data the paper uses a novel estimation procedure based on a pseudo gravity model then identifies key determinants of international migration and subsequently uses estimated parameters to impute missing data non oecd destinations account for one third of skilled migration while oecd destinations are declining in relative importance

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

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

94 effective policies for a two stage serial inventory system with stochastic demand a two stage inventory system is considered where poisson demand occurs at stage 1 and stage 1 replenishes its inventory from stage 2 which in turn orders from an outside supplier with unlimited stock each shipment either to stage 2 or to stage 1 incurs a fixed setup cost under the assumption that the supply leadtime at stage 2 is zero we characterize a simple heuristic policy whose long run average cost is guaranteed to be within 6 of optimality i e a 94 effective policy the paper also provides heuristic policies for more general inventory systems and reports computational results

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 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

remittances transaction costs and informality abstract recorded workers remittances to developing countries reached 167 billion in 2005 bringing increasing attention to these flows as a potential tool for development in this paper we explore the determinants of remittances and their associated transaction costs we find that recorded remittances depend positively on the stock of migrants and negatively on transfer costs and exchange rate restrictions in turn transfer costs are lower when financial systems are more developed and exchange rates less volatile the negative impact of transactions costs on remittances suggests that migrants either refrain from sending money home or else remit through informal channels when costs are high we provide evidence from household surveys supportive of a sizeable informal sector

comovement in gdp trends and cycles among trading partners abstract it has long been recognized that business cycle comovement is greater between countries that trade more intensively with one another however nations face shocks to both the cyclical and trend components of their gdp series contrary to the result for cyclical fluctuations we find comovement of shocks to the trend component of real gdp is weaker among countries that trade more intensively with one another we simulate changes in ten year output growth correlations corresponding to the estimated effects of trade and show that the impact of trade on trend comovement is quantitatively more important than its effect on cyclical comovement

estimating remittance functions for pacific island migrants there is concern that pacific island economies dependent on remittances of migrants will endure foreign exchange shortages and declining living standards as remittance levels drop due to lower migration rates and the belief that migrants willingness to remit decreases over time the empirical validity of the remittance decay hypothesis has never been tested from survey data on tongan and western samoan migrants in sydney this paper estimates remittance functions using tobit regression analysis it is found that the remittance decay hypothesis has no empirical validity and migrants are motivated by factors other than altruistic family support including asset accumulation and investment back home c 1997 elsevier science ltd

a practitioners guide to gravity models of international migration the use of bilateral data for the analysis of international migration is at the same time a blessing and a curse it is a blessing because the dyadic dimension of the data allows researchers to address a number of previously unanswered questions but it is also a curse for the various analytical challenges it gives rise to this paper presents the theoretical foundations of the estimation of gravity models of international migration and the main difficulties that have to be tackled in the econometric analysis such as the nature of migration data how to account for multilateral resistance to migration or endogeneity we also review some empirical evidence that has considered these issues

batch size and stocking levels in multi echelon repairable systems in multi echelon repairable inventory systems with high set up cost for order and or high demand rates the use of batch ordering may be more cost effective than the common s 1 s ordering policy this paper addresses the issue of determining the optimal order batch size and stocking levels at the stocking locations in such a system a power approximation is used to estimate the total system stock and backorder levels from which the optimal batch size can be readily determined a search routine involving one pass searches are then followed to obtain the stocking levels at the depot and the local sites of the system this procedure has been evaluated using 900 test cases and has been found to be very effective the power approximation approach also results in a simple analytical relationship to test whether or not s 1 s is an optimal ordering policy for repairable items in a multi echelon environment

optimization of order up to s policies for two level inventory systems with compound poisson demand abstract we consider a two level inventory system with one warehouse and n retailers leadtimes are constant and the retailers face different compound poisson demand processes all facilities apply order up to s replenishment policies we show how to evaluate holding and shortage costs exactly

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

moving to autarky trade creation and home market effect an exhaustive analysis of regional trade agreements in africa this article analyses the effects of regional trade agreements rtas on bilateral trade in africa a structural gravity equation is estimated over the period 1955 2014 the overall effect of rtas

optimal policies for multi echelon inventory problems with batch ordering in many production distribution systems materials flow from one stage to another in fixed lot sizes for example a retailer orders a full truckload from a manufacturer to qualify for a quantity discount a factory has a material handling system that moves full containers of parts from one production stage to the next in this paper we derive optimal policies for multi stage serial and assembly systems where materials flow in fixed batches the optimal policies have a simple structure and their parameters can be easily determined this research extends the multi echelon inventory theory in several ways it generalizes the clark scarf model by allowing batch transfers of inventories rosling 1989 shows that assembly systems can be interpreted as serial systems under the assumption that there are no setup costs we show that the series interpretation still holds when materials flow in fixed batches which satisfy a certain regularity condition finally veinott 1965 identifies an optimal policy for a single location inventory system with batch ordering this paper generalizes his result to multi echelon settings

trade costs and the home market effect most of the theoretical and empirical studies on the home market effect hme assume the existence of an outside good that absorbs all trade imbalances and equalizes wages we study the consequences on the hme of removing this assumption the hme is attenuated and more interestingly it becomes non linear the non linearity implies that the hme is more important for very large and very small countries than for medium size countries the empirical investigation conducted on a database comprising 25 indus tries 25 countries and 7 years con rms the presence of the hme and of its non linear shape

on the pervasiveness of home market effects paul krugman s model of trade predicts that the country with the relatively large number of consumers is the net exporter and hosts a disproportionate share of firms in the increasing returns sector he terms these results home market effects this paper analyses three additional models featuring increasing returns firm mobility and trade costs to assess the robustness of home market effects to alternative modelling assumptions we find strikingly similar results for two of the models that relax assumptions about the nature of demand competition and trade costs however a model that links varieties to nations rather than firms can generate opposite results

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

trade and the location of industries some new results abstract we study a two country two sector model with free entry and monopolistic competition where both industries use labour to produce differentiated goods the two countries are identical except for size labour is freely mobile across industries but it cannot move internationally transport costs affect both industries the location of industries and the pattern of trade are the results of the interaction of two effects the home market effect and the wage differential effect the main results are i if the two countries are sufficiently close in size and demand elasticities differ across industries transport costs being equal a continuous fall in transport costs from a prohibitive level to zero is associated with a reversal in the pattern of trade at some intermediate level for large transport costs the large country is a net exporter of the more differentiated good for lower transport costs the large country becomes a net exporter of the less differentiated good ii if the two countries are very different in size and demand elasticities differ across industries transport costs being equal the larger country is always a net exporter of the less differentiated good

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

one warehouse multiretailer systems with centralized stock information we consider a distribution system with a central warehouse and multiple retailers the warehouse orders from an outside supplier and replenishes the retailers which in turn satisfy customer demand the retailers are nonidentical and their demand processes are independent compound poisson there are economies of scale in inventory replenishment which is controlled by an echelon stock batch transfer policy for the special case with simple poisson demand we develop an exact method for computing the long run average holding and backorder costs of the system based on this exact method we provide approximations for compound poisson demand numerical examples are used to illustrate the accuracy of the approximations we also present a numerical comparison between the average costs of a heuristic echelon stock policy and an existing lower bound on the average costs of all feasible policies

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

a multiechelon inventory model with fixed replenishment intervals this paper develops a new model for studying multiechelon inventory systems with stochastic demand for the model we assume that each site in the system orders at preset times according to an order up to policy that delivery times are deterministic and that the demand processes are stochastic with independent increments we introduce a new scheme for allocating stock in short supply which we call virtual allocation and which permits significant tractability we exercise the model on a set of test problems for two echelon systems to get insight into the structure of good policies the primary findings are that both the central warehouse upper echelon and the retail sites lower echelon should hold safety stock but that most of the safety stock should be at the retail sites consequently the central warehouse will stock out with high probability furthermore we show that the virtual allocation rule is near optimal for the set of test problems

remittances and economic growth larger impacts in smaller countries this paper examines the impact of remittances on economic growth in small island developing states sids results from variants of an empirical model suggest that while on average there is at best no association between remittances and growth in developing countries there is a positive association between these variables in sids this finding holds for sids in sub saharan africa and the pacific but not for those in latin america and the caribbean relationships between remittances economic volatility and household labour supply are offered as reasons for these findings

are bilateral remittances countercyclical by putting together a relatively large data set on bilateral remittances of emigrants this paper is able to shed light on the important hypothesis of smoothing the smoothing hypothesis is that remittances are countercyclical with respect to income in the worker s country of origin the recipient of the remittance while procyclical with respect to income in the migrant s host country the sender of the remittance the econometric results confirm the hypothesis this affirmation of smoothing is important for two reasons first it suggests that remittances should be placed on the list of criteria for an optimum currency area second it brings into doubt plans by governments in some developing countries to harness remittances for their own use in that government spending in these countries generally fails the test of countercyclicality which remittances pass

exact and approximate evaluation of batch ordering policies for two level inventory systems we consider a two level inventory system with one warehouse and n identical retailers lead times transportation times are constant and the retailers face independent poisson demand in a previous paper we derived a recursive procedure for determining the policy costs for an average item in case of one for one replenishment policies in this paper we show how these results can be used for the exact or approximate evaluation of more general policies where both the retailers and the warehouse order in batches we compare our methods to the method recently suggested by a svoronos and p zipkin

evaluation of installation stock based r q policies fortwo level inventory systems with poisson demands we consider a two level inventory system with one warehouse and n retailers leadtimes transportation times are constant and the retailers face different poisson demand processes all facilities apply continuous review installation stock r q policies with different reorder points and batch quantities we show how to evaluate holding and shortage costs exactly in case of two retailers in case of more than two retailers we use the same methodology as an approximation when evaluating costs at a certain retailer the other retailers are then aggregated into a single retailer

consumption smoothing migration and marriage evidence from rural india a significant proportion of migration in low income countries particularly in rural areas is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage we seek to explain these mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among indian households in particular we hypothesize that the marriage of daughters to locationally distant dispersed yet kinship related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks analysis of longitudinal south indian village data lends support to the hypothesis marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption farm households afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance marriage cum migration the hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration that are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains

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