globalization migration and development the role of mexican migrant remittances in this paper we present evidence suggesting that international migrant remittances generally lead to improved developmental outcomes using a cross section of mexican municipalities in the year 2000 we show that increases in the fraction of households receiving international remittances are generally correlated with better schooling and health outcomes and with reductions in some dimensions of poverty our results take into account the likely endogeneity between migration remittances and developmental outcome variables and they suggest that measures to facilitate remittance flows are desirable

remittance effects on child labour evidence from burkina faso abstractthis article explores the effects of remittance receipt on child labour in an african context we focus on burkina faso a country with a high prevalence of child labour and a high rate of migration given the complex relationship between remittance receipt and household time allocation decisions we instrument remittances using economic conditions in remittance sending countries and explore heterogeneous effects across different types of potential remitters while remittances have no significant effect on child labour on average transfers reduce child labour in long term migrant households for whom the disruptive effect of migration is no longer felt we find no gender difference but remittances seem to affect mainly the labour market participation of younger children

time is money time pressure incentives and the quality of decision making many decisions in economics and finance have to be made under severe time pressure furthermore payoffs frequently depend on the speed of decision making as for instance when buying and selling stocks in this paper we examine the influence of time pressure and time dependent incentive schemes on the quality of decision making in an experimental beauty contest game we find that convergence to equilibrium is faster and payoffs are higher under low time pressure than under high time pressure interestingly time dependent payoffs under high time pressure lead to significantly quicker decision making without reducing the quality of decisions

migration remittances and poverty in ecuador abstractwe analyse the influence of the recent wave of migration on the incidence of poverty among stayers in ecuador we draw our data from a survey that provides detailed information on migrants the analysis reveals a significant negative effect of migration on poverty among migrant households this effect is substantially smaller than the one that we find focusing on recipient households we explore the factors that account for this divergence our analysis entails that the existing empirical evidence on the relationship between remittances and poverty does not need to be informative about the size of the direct poverty reduction potential of migration

migrants and housing investments theory and evidence from nigeria the dominance of housing may reflect limitations in the menu of investment choices available to migrants in the country of origin in many developing countries individuals face relatively few savings opportunities where productive assets such as land farm assets are associated with high risks and or low rates of return housing investments offer unique advantages in that they are durable highly visible and associated with low risk and monitoring requirements however there are some important drawbacks associated with housing investments in particular where resale and rental markets for housing are not well developed migrants housing assets may be relatively illiquid and irreversible in the next section i provide some background on general patterns of investment behavior among migrants here the evidence on housing investments is discussed for a rich set of migrant sending and receiving countries in section iii i develop the conceptual framework for understanding migrants housing investment decisions section iv provides a description of the data sources section v outlines the empirical strategy in section vi i discuss the empirical findings section vii presents conclusions excerpt

identification of supplier induced demand in the health care sector this paper explores the issues and pitfalls encountered when attempting to test empirically the hypothesis that physician hospital or any other input supply level induces increasing demand for health services in the strict sense of demand shift and through that increased demand for the input in question evidence is presented which suggests that an empirical test of the supplier induced demand sid hypothesis of the type traditionally performed may not in fact be feasible with cross sectional aggregate data such as is usually used

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

identification of physician induced demand whether market failure exists in the health care sector because physicians induce demand in their own self interest has not been clearly addressed because of identification problems a model is developed which includes the patient s financial burden as a limiting factor on demand inducement new data from a national survey are used to test the demand inducement hypothesis and identify physician initiated expenditures when individual health insurance and other factors are held constant additional corroboration of the physician induced demand hypothesis is found but the magnitude of the effect is very small and is statistically significant only for more discretionary expenditures

a clarification of theories and evidence on supplier induced demand for physicians services this article both simplifies and extends the literature on physician induced demand it shows that inducement should be expected in all imperfectly competitive markets that are also characterized by incomplete agency relationships more important it argues that confusion over the extent of the inducement phenomenon has been created by several contributions that fail to distinguish between the effects of changes in physician population ratios on changes in the individual physician s output and the effects on per capita utilization in particular it demonstrates that by confounding units of analysis the major empirical results found in recent articles by rossiter and wilensky are contradicted by their model their evidence however together with findings from other studies are reinterpreted to suggest that physicians are even more constrained than is generally believed in being able to induce increases in demand

migration networks and microenterprises in mexico are migration networks associated with lower capital costs or the alleviation of capital constraints we examine these questions with data measuring access to remittance flows among small scale entrepreneurs in mexico using a survey of more than 6000 self employed workers and small firm owners located in 44 urban areas of mexico we estimate the impact of attachment to migration networks on the level of capital investment the capital output ratio sales and profits of microenterprises the impact is identified from the geographic pattern of migration from mexico driven by the completion of rail lines in the early 1900s for the full sample of firms we find that migration is associated with higher investment levels and higher profits but not higher sales the strongest effects on investment are in the categories of automobiles tools and inventories when the sample is limited to firms in high capital sectors investment sales and profits all increase with attachment to the migration networks suggesting that attachment to the migration network alleviates capital constraints in those sectors

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

the effects of international migration on migrant source households evidence from ethiopian diversity visa lottery migrants about a million people have migrated to the us via the diversity visa dv lottery the dv was instituted by an act of the united states congress to diversify the u s population through a lottery made available to people from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the country in any given year the probability of winning the lottery is less than 1 with millions of people from around the world competing for a maximum of 55 000 immigrant visas that can be obtained through this migration channel using ethiopian dv participants which have consistently made up between 6 and 8 of all dv immigrants i study the causal effects of emigration on the well being of the migrant sending families i infer that migration contributes positively to the welfare of the source families overall migration increases consumer expenditure but has no effect on savings and business ownership of the senders the positive treatment effects do not diminish with duration of emigration migrant men contribute more to the increase in their families standard of living than their female counterparts do while expenditure on food and energy are invariant to the migrants gender the gains in terms of durable ownership access to clean water and sanitation facilities occur almost entirely in families where the emigrants are men i find that dv participants are favorably selected relative to the overall population

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

why do migrants return to poor countries evidence from philippine migrants responses to exchange rate shocks abstract this paper distinguishes between target earnings and life cycle motivations for return migration by examining how philippine migrants return decisions respond to major unexpected exchange rate changes in their overseas locations due to the asian financial crisis overall the evidence favors the life cycle explanation more favorable exchange rate shocks lead to fewer migrant returns a10 improvement in the exchange rate reduces the 12 month return rate by 1 4 percentage points however some migrants appear motivated by target earnings considerations in households with intermediate foreign earnings favorable exchange rate shocks have the least effect on return migration but lead to increases in household investment

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

the impact of remittances on investment and poverty in ghana summary this paper analyzes the impact of internal remittances from ghana and international remittances from african or other countries on investment and poverty in ghana it has three findings first when compared to what they would have spent without the receipt of remittances households receiving remittances spend less at the margin on food second households receiving remittances spend more at the margin on three investment goods education housing and health third the receipt of remittances greatly reduces likelihood of household poverty these findings support the growing view that remittances can reduce poverty and increase investment in developing countries

will skill based immigration policies lead to lower remittances an analysis of the relations between education sponsorship and remittances as more and more developed countries adopt policies that favour highly educated immigrants the impact of such policies on developing countries remains unclear some researchers have argued that mi

migrant remittances and physical investment purchases evidence from kenyan households this paper investigates the impact of remittances on household decisions to purchase physical investments in kenya using household survey data an instrumental variables approach is employed using rainfall variation and mobile network coverage as instruments to control for the endogeneity of remittances the empirical evidence obtained is suggestive of remittances having a positive and significant effect on the decisions by households to purchase physical investments

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

binary choice with binary endogenous regressors in panel data this article considers the estimation of the causal effect of fertility on female labor force participation equations my main concern is to examine two considerations the endogeneity of fertility and the impact of controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and for predetermined existing children using psid data a switching binary panel data model that accounts for selectivity bias as well as for other forms of time invariant unobserved heterogeneity is estimated individual effects are allowed to be correlated with the explanatory variables which can be predetermined as opposed to strictly exogenous family sex composition is used as an instrument for exogenous fertility movements the results indicate that exogeneity assumptions of children variables induce a downward bias in absolute value in the estimated negative effect of fertility on participation although the failure to account for unobserved heterogeneity overstates this effect moreover stronger effects of fertility are found when existing c

remittances household expenditure and investment in guatemala the author uses a large household data set from guatemala to analyze how the receipt of internal remittances from guatemala and international remittances from the united states affects the marginal spending behavior of households on various consumption and investment goods contrary to other studies the author finds that households receiving remittances actually spend less at the margin on consumption food and consumer goods and durables than do households receiving no remittances instead of spending on consumption households receiving remittances tend to spend more on investment goods like education health and housing the analysis shows that a large amount of remittance money goes into education at the margin households receiving internal and international remittances spend 45 and 58 percent more respectively on education than do households with no remittances these increased expenditures on education represent investment in human capital like other studies the author finds that remittance receiving households spend more at the margin on housing these increased expenditures on housing represent a type of investment for the migrant as well as a means for boosting local economic development by creating new income and employment opportunities for skilled and unskilled workers