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

an epec approach to the yearly maintenance scheduling of generating units this paper considers the yearly maintenance scheduling of generating units within a market environment each producer schedules its units maintenance periods to maximize its revenue using a bilevel approach the upper level problem of this bilevel model seeks maximum revenue and contains unit scheduling constraints while the lower level problems represent the market clearing process under different operating conditions this single producer maintenance problem can be recast as a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints mpec since the mpecs of all producers have to be considered simultaneously and the market clearing process is common to all of them the proposed formulation for maintenance scheduling is an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints epec corresponding to a multiple leader common follower game the solution of this epec is a set of equilibria in which none of the producers is able to increase its revenue unilaterally by changing the maintenance periods of its generating units

the consumption function and intertemporal spillover effects the fact that consumers save more or consume less as long as they expect pessimistically that labor supply constraint will be binding in the future is speculated all the time however no theoretical works are developed satisfactorily without taking the intertemporal spillover effects into account in this paper an explicit solution to the consumer s intertemporal optimization problem is derived by taking account of the intertemporal spillover effects in addition it is shown that the extrinsic uncertainty of labor supply rationing induces people to save more money thus this model is an extension of clower s and barro grossman s models

the determinants of migrant remittances this article explores the factors that account for variation in remittance flows why do some immigrants send much more money to their country of origin than others this is a question that in the aggregate has implications for national economies and migration related policy the analysis departs from the classic studies of remittances and considers how the context of contemporary migration in europe is likely to affect remittance patterns possible influences on remittance sending are disaggregated into nine domains and each is discussed with reference to theoretical arguments and empirical findings the temporal aspects of remittance sending are discussed separately the final section of the article considers implications of the micro level analysis for aggregate remittance flows and policy it is argued that the focus on altruism versus self interest in the literature has partly diverted attention from explaining the actual variation that is important in a policy perspective

cournot equilibrium considering unit outages and fuel cost uncertainty the cournot model is a common and reasonable approximation to representing strategic competition in electricity markets this paper proposes a nash cournot model in which unit outages and fuel cost volatility are both accounted for the nash equilibrium quantity of each firm is obtained by maximizing its expected profit given the distribution of fuel costs and the availability of generating units the cournot equilibrium problem is formulated as a linear complementarity problem we give a numerical example to show how the price equilibrium quantities and firms profits are affected when outages and fuel cost volatility are ignored

savings remittances and return migration abstract using a vast west german data set the paper shows that savings and remittances of migrants can be well explained by remigration plans and economic as well as demographic variables however the planned future duration of residence in germany has a negative and significant effect only on remittances

a three level static milp model for generation and transmission expansion planning we present a three level equilibrium model for the expansion of an electric network the lower level model represents the equilibrium of a pool based market the intermediate level represents the nash equilibrium in generation capacity expansion taking into account the outcomes on the spot market and the upper level model represents the anticipation of transmission expansion planning to the investment in generation capacity and the pool based market equilibrium the demand has been considered as exogenous and locational marginal prices are obtained as endogenous variables of the model the three level model is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming milp problem the model is applied to a realistic power system in chile to illustrate the methodology and proper conclusions are reached

irregular staggered contracts and monetary policy taylor s 1980 notion of staggered contracts has been widely recognized as an elegant and useful tool to modelize wage setting procedures and to generate persistence in output and employment levels in this paper we present an extension of taylor s suggestion in which staggered contracts are irregular this implies that the wage equation varies period after period recurrently and raises the issues of the non convergence and the non unicity of the corresponding reduced form then we show that a specific feedback monetary policy may resolve this difficulty and induce a unique solution when explosive solutions are a priori forbidden such a monetary policy is formed by a system of rules varying period after period recurrently

speculative currency attacks and balance of payments crises abstract this paper reviews the recent theoretical literature on collapsing exchange rate regimes using a combination of technique intuition and realworld observation we discuss the literature s main insights point out some unresolved questions and offer suggestions for future research the survey should be of interest to both specialists and non specialists in the field of international macroeconomics

scenario reduction for futures market trading in electricity markets to make informed decisions in futures markets of electric energy stochastic programming models are commonly used such models treat stochastic processes via a set of scenarios which are plausible realizations throughout the decision making horizon of the stochastic processes the number of scenarios needed to accurately represent the uncertainty involved is generally large which may render the associated stochastic programming problem intractable hence scenario reduction techniques are needed to trim down the number of scenarios while keeping most of the stochastic information embedded in such scenarios this paper proposes a novel scenario reduction procedure that advantageously compares with existing ones for electricity market problems tackled via two stage stochastic programming

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

nash equilibrium in strategic bidding a binary expansion approach this paper presents a mixed integer linear programming solution approach for the equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints epec problem of finding the nash equilibrium ne in strategic bidding in short term electricity markets a binary expansion be scheme is used to transform the nonlinear nonconvex ne problem into a mixed integer linear problem milp which can be solved by commercially available computational systems the be scheme can be applicable to cournot bertrand or joint price quantity bidding models the approach is illustrated in case studies with configurations derived from the 95 gw brazilian system including unit commitment decisions to the price maker agents

remittance receipts and allocation a study of three african countries remittances may influence household expenditures poverty rates development and investments in the receiving country using world bank survey data from ethiopia uganda and kenya the influence of remitters and recipients characteristics on remittance amounts and allocation is examined effects of the remitter receiver characteristics on remittance amounts are generally similar between countries such similarities imply a potential similar effect of policies in these countries age household income frequency of communication family relations with remitter and country the recipient resided in influence remittance allocation recipients in ethiopia and uganda are more likely to allocate remittance towards savings than those in kenya

monetary economics a review essay in this essay i define money to be whatever objects serve as generally acceptable media of exchange and i define monetary economics to be the study of the causes and economic consequences of the monetization of exchange that is of the use of media of exchange these definitions lead me to specify the distinctive objectives of monetary economics to be to understand 1 the monetization of exchange and its relation to the technologies of production and of exchange 2 the form that money takes and especially the viability of fiat money 3 the determination and significance of the real value of units of money and 4 the relation between the nominal quantity of money and aggregate economic activity the essay tries to acquaint the reader with the contents of the recently published handbook of monetary economic as they relate to these objectives of monetary economics and offer some critical thoughts on selected unsettled issues in monetary economics that my reading of the handbook suggested this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

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

ruling out divergent speculative bubbles abstract the growth in the empirical literature on testing for divergent in mean speculative bubbles indicates that existing theoretical arguments for ruling out such price paths are not sufficiently compelling here we strengthen the case for ruling out explosive or implosive bubbles a priori by filling in two gaps first we demonstrate why divergent stochastic bubbles arising from purely extrinsic uncertainty as in blanchard 1979 cannot be equilibria in a monetary optimizing model second we show why existing arguments for ruling out implosive price bubbles are insufficient in some cases and we provide stronger arguments

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

inflation determination with taylor rules is new keynesian analysis critically flawed abstract cochrane 2007 has strongly questioned the basic economic logic of current monetary policy analysis arguing that new keynesian nk models imply rational expectations paths with explosive inflation that do not imply explosions in real variables relevant for transversality conditions consequently the usual logic does not rule out solutions with explosive inflation that result does not however justify negative conclusions about nk analysis for a different criterion is logically satisfactory it is that to be plausible a re solution must satisfy the property of least squares learnability adoption of this criterion serves to justify in principle the bulk of current mainstream analysis

remittances and financial access is there really a link and for whom evidence from mexican household data in policy discussions it has frequently been claimed that migrants remittances could function as a catalyst for financial access among receiving households this paper provides empirical evidence on this hypothesis from mexico a major receiver of remittances worldwide using the mexican family life survey panel mxfls for 2002 and 2005 the results from the fixed effects logit model show that receiving remittances is strongly correlated with the ownership of savings accounts and to a limited degree with the availability of borrowing options effects are particularly important for microfinance institutions and more important for rural households compared to urban households

income transfers of chinese rural migrants some empirical evidence from jinan this paper explores the determinants of migrant remittances to rural households using data on male migrant workers drawn from the jinan municipality in shandong province in the summer of 1995 the majority of migrants are found to retain close links with their rural households with 85 remitting some income in the 12 months preceding the survey date the transfers accounted for over a third of urban labour earnings a number of models are used to undertake the estimation of remittance functions no evidence of altruistic behaviour is uncovered and evidence for exchange and coinsurance theories is mixed labour earnings proved the most robust determinant of the level of remittance and the remittance wage elasticity calculated is found to be at the top end of the range of estimates obtained in the literature

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

ruling out pareto dominated monetary equilibria abstract it is well known that under nominal money supply rules accomplished through lump sum transfers non uniqueness and non optimality of the resource allocation often obtains in monetary models we show that uniqueness and optimality of the resource allocation obtains if the monetary authority conducts friedman s rule through open market operations our result necessitates and we provide a clarification of existing irrelevance theorems for open market operations our result also provides a partial resolution of the uniqueness efficiency conflict of nominal money supply rules raised by woodford economic theory 4 1994 345 380

inflation tax and money essentiality this chapter addresses the issue of money essentiality using brock s 1975 model we present an argument which casts doubt on the conclusion reached by obstfeld and rogoff 1983 henceforth called o r based on the same theoretical framework according to o r speculative hyperinflation under a pure fiat money regime can be ruled out only when severe restrictions are placed on individual preferences e g agents must have infinitely negative utility when their real balances are zero we argue that this restriction can be tested with data from hyperinflation experiments by looking at the behavior of the inflation tax as real balances approach zero

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 theory of rational bubbles in stock prices free disposal of equity which directly rules out the existence of negative rational bubbles in stock pric es also imposes theoretical restrictions on the possible existence o f positive rational bubbles the analysis in this paper shows that a positive rational bubble can start only on the first date of trading of a stock thus the existence of a rational bubble at any date woul d imply that the stock has been overvalued relative to market fundame ntals since the first date of trading and that prior to the first da te of trading the issuer of the stock and potential stockholders who anticipated the initial pricing of the stock expected that the stock would be overvalued copyright 1988 by royal economic society

chaotic dynamics in a cash in advance economy abstract this paper introduces sufficient conditions for the existence of deterministic cycles and chaos in cash in advance models building on the earlier work of woodford 1994 chaotic equilibria are shown to be particularly likely in the cash in advance model because of a unique characteristic of such models a discontinuous derivative in the difference equation map at the satiation level of real balances the existence of a kink means that chaotic equilibria may exist without implausibly large curvatures in the utility function since a chaotic time series that makes use of the kink would sometimes exhibit zero nominal interest rates the paper also gives an example of chaos in which nominal interest rates remain strictly positive

equilibria in an oligopolistic electricity pool with stepwise offer curves we study the equilibria reached by strategic producers in a pool based network constrained electricity market the behavior of each producer is modeled by a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints mpec whose objective is maximizing profit and whose complementarity constraints describe market clearing the joint solution of all these mpecs constitutes an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints epec the equilibria associated with the epec are analyzed by solving the strong stationarity conditions of all mpecs which can be linearized without approximation by mixed integer linear programming milp techniques the resulting mixed integer linear conditions can be reformulated as an optimization problem that allows establishing diverse objectives to differentiate among alternative equilibria

strategic offering and equilibrium in coupled gas and electricity markets the wide integration of gas fired units and implementation of power to gas technologies bring increasing interdependence among the natural gas and electricity infrastructures this paper studies the equilibrium of the coupled gas and electricity markets which is driven by the strategic offering behaviors each producer endeavours to maximize its own profit by taking the market clearing process into consideration the market equilibrium can be obtained from an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints a special diagonalization algorithm is devised in which the unilateral equilibrium of the gas or electricity market is found in the inner loop given the rivals strategies the interactions of the two markets are tackled in the outer loop case studies on two test systems validate the proposed methodology

economic valuation of reserves in power systems with high penetration of wind power this paper proposes a methodology to determine the required level of spinning and nonspinning reserves in a power system with a high penetration of wind power the computation of the required reserve levels and their costs is achieved through a stochastic programming market clearing model spanning a daily time horizon this model considers the network constraints and takes into account the cost of both the load shedding and the wind spillage the methodology proposed is illustrated using an example and a realistic case study some conclusions are finally drawn

exercise of market power on ramp rate in wind integrated power systems with an increasing penetration of wind power there is likely to be an increasing need for fast ramping generating units these generators ensure that no load is lost if supply drops due to the uncertainties in wind power generation however it is observed in practice that in a presence of network constraints fast ramping generating units are prone to act strategically and exercise market power by withholding their ramp rates in this paper we model this gaming behavior on ramp rates we assume a market operator who collects bids in form of marginal costs quantities and ramp rates he runs a ramp constrained economic dispatch given the generators bids forecasted demand and contingencies following the game theoretic concepts we set up a multi level optimization problem the lower level problem is the ramp constrained economic dispatch and the higher level represents the profit maximization problems solved by strategic generators the whole problem is formulated as an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints epec the outcome of the epec problem is a set of nash equilibria to tackle the multiple nash equilibria problem the concept of the extremal nash equilibria is defined and formulated we model the concept of extremal nash equilibria as a single stage mixed integer linear programming problem milp and demonstrate the application of this mathematical framework on an illustrative case and on a more realistic case study with tractable results

finding equilibria in the pool based electricity market with strategic wind power producers and network constraints this paper proposes a model to find the equilibria in the short term electricity market with large scale wind power penetration the behavior of each strategic player is modeled through a two stage mathematical problem with equilibrium constraints mpec where the upper level problem maximizes the profit of the strategic player and the lower level problem describes the clearing processes of the day ahead and real time markets while considering the network constraints the joint solution of all the mpecs constitutes an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints epec the uncertain wind power production and demand are represented by a set of plausible scenarios by using the duality theory and karush kuhn tucker condition each mpec is transferred into a mixed integer linear programing problem the nash equilibria of the electricity market are obtained by solving the epec using game theory and the diagonalization algorithm case studies are performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed model

the volatility effect of diaspora s location remittances can transmit volatility from host to home countries for some common patterns of diaspora s geographical distribution in a migration portfolio model the overall risk of volatility of any set of diaspora location is decomposed into a contagion and a concentration risks a diaspora located in more volatile destinations induces a higher contagion risk while a diaspora located in few destination countries increases the concentration risk a series of estimations on a large panel of developing countries over 1995 2015 provide evidence for these two risks estimation of a structural model confirms that the geography of diaspora has an indirect impact on the origin country s aggregate instability through remittances

strategic generation investment using a complementarity approach this paper provides a methodology to assist a strategic producer in making informed decisions on generation investment a single target year is considered with demand variations modeled through blocks the strategic behavior of the producer is represented through a bilevel model the upper level considers both investment decisions and strategic production actions and the lower level corresponds to market clearing prices are obtained as dual variables of power balance equations rival uncertainties on offering and investment are characterized through scenarios the resulting model is a large scale mixed integer lp problem solvable using currently available branch and cut techniques results pertaining to an illustrative example and a case study are reported and discussed

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

are remittances a substitute for credit carrying the financial burden of health shocks in national and transnational households summary this paper tests for the assumption that remittances are a substitute for credit by comparing the response to health related shocks among national and transnational households using mexican household panel data while the occurrence of serious health shocks that required hospital treatment doubled the average debt burden of exposed households compared to the control group households with nuclear family members a parent child or spouse in the us did not increase their debts due to health shocks this finding is consistent with the view that remittances respond to households demand for financing emergencies and make them less reliant on debt financing

the stability of money supply policies that peg the rate of interest this paper examines monetary policies that peg the rate of interest without relying on an interestelastic money supply in one case the money supply is completely predetermined in the sense that it only depends on past disturbances that is current disturbances do not affect the current money supply as is the case with an interest elastic money supply interest elastic money supply rules are shown to be untenable because such interest elasticity if large enough results in dynamic instability economists have long debated the relative desirability and the viability of two alternate monetary policies a fixed money supply and a pegged rate of interest one familiar theme which runs from wicksell through patinkin 6 and finally to sargent and wallace 7 is the possible incompatibility between a pegged rate of interest and a determinate nominal price level using different models and quite different analytical techniques both patinkin 6 and sargent and wallace 7 demonstrate this incompatibility more recently sargent and wallace 8 do not treat a pegged rate of interest and a fixed money supply as mutually exclusive alternatives rather their version of the real bills doctrine is a policy that fixes both the money supply and the rate of interest through the use of one period currency loans while preserving dynamic stability and establishing a determinate equilibrium price level the money supply rules derived below which peg the rate of interest are similar to the policy considered by sargent and wallace 8 since the analytic framework employed below is similar to that used by mccallum 5 canzoneri henderson and rogoff 1 and goodfriend 3 this paper bridges the gap between the sargent wallace treatment of a pegged rate of interest and discussions that employ a more conventional analytic framework section ii derives two interest rate pegging policies by employing the notion of a permanent future rate of money growth defined analogously to permanent income this concept is used to show that policies that peg the rate of interest while preserving dynamic stability are equivalent to policies that fine tune the public s perception of future rates of money growth it is this fine tuning of the public s perception of future rates of money growth rather than a perfectly interest

finding multiple nash equilibria in pool based markets a stochastic epec approach we present a compact formulation to find all pure nash equilibria in a pool based electricity market with stochastic demands the equilibrium model is formulated as a stochastic equilibrium problem subject to equilibrium constraints epec the problem is based on a stackelberg game where the generating companies gencos optimize their strategic bids anticipating the solution of the independent system operator iso market clearing a finite strategy approach both in prices and quantities is applied to transform the nonlinear and nonconvex set of nash inequalities into a mixed integer linear problem milp a procedure to find all nash equilibria is developed by generating holes that are added as linear constraints to the feasibility region the result of the problem is the set of all pure nash equilibria and the market clearing prices and assigned energies by the iso a case study illustrates the methodology and proper conclusions are reached

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

drivers and dynamics of internal and international remittances this article analyses whether and how intra household remittance volumes vary with the length of a migrant s absence and whether the drivers and dynamics of remittance decay depend on the migrant s destination we address these questions by using data from the 64th round of the indian national sample survey conducted between july 2007 and june 2008 we find that the average intra household remittance function follows a curvilinear trajectory that is best approximated by a quartic m shaped specification the volatility of intra household remittances is distinct across migration destinations with international remittance flows being more volatile than internal intra state or inter state flows