(2009)), and; a plethora of studies evaluating the effect of remittances on various aspects of economic and social well-being among households that receive them.

Among these themes, the literature on the impact of migration and remittances on household well being is perhaps the most well established and also the most voluminous. Recent research focusing on international migration highlights various channels through which remittances can be useful for the development process. Yang and Choi (2007) show that remittance flows can help households smooth consumption in the face of aggregate shocks that simultaneously render local risk-coping mechanisms ineffective<sup>4</sup> . Woodruff and Zenteno (2007) show that remittances and access to migration networks bolster entrepreneurship in Mexico. In a similar vein, Yang (2008a) finds an increase in hours in self- employment and greater likelihood of starting a capital-intensive enterprise among remittance receiving households in the Philippines. In addition, findings of a positive effect of remittances on measures of human capital accumulation such as schooling in Edwards and Ureta (2003), Yang (2008b) and Amuedo-Dorantes and Pozo (2010) point to the possibility that remittances may be important drivers of intergenerational economic mobility and longer term growth. Even in the short run, the growth in household consumption that is spurred by remittances has led to a decline in poverty incidence in many countries. Some examples are Adams et al. (2005), Lopez-Cordova (2005) and Lokshin, Bontch-Osmolovski, and Glinskaya (2010).

However, despite the fact that most emigrants from developing countries originate from rural, predominantly agricultural communities where households rely heavily on the natural environment for livelihood, there has been no research to our knowledge that assesses the relationship between increased labor mobility and the attendant rise in rural incomes on the one hand and changes in natural resources and land use within sending communities on the other<sup>5</sup> . This is partly because most of the research in this area has focused narrowly on private, household level outcomes and largely ignored important community level interactions, spillovers and general equilibrium effects. An exodus of working age men from economically isolated villages to cities or foreign labor markets may have implications for the prevailing agricultural wage in the local economies they leave behind<sup>6</sup> .

> 4Everyone in a village may want to access credit right after a major disaster driving up the price of credit or everyone in the village may want to sell their livestock at the same time following a period of drought, driving down the price.

> 5Most work at the intersection of migration and the environment has either been motivated by the need to understand the environmental impact of immigrants on urban centers and coastal areas or focused on the plight of the environmental refuges or individuals dislocated from their homes and forced to migrate due to natural and environmental disasters.

> 6Sometimes these general equilibrium effects may large enough to drive a wedge between what may be beneficial for the society as a whole on the one hand and what is beneficial for each individual actor. If returns to schooling increased in the destination areas, this would in principle at least, incentivize children to stay in school longer and invest in their human capital. But on the other hand, an outflow of young workers may lead local agricultural wages to rise, inducing children to tradeoff future returns in a foreign labor market with high current wages in the local market. An example of a similar spillover effect is presented in Foster and Rosenzweig (2004) for the context of rural India during the Green Revolution. Technological growth raised returns to education for children coming from land-holding families but as they responded by increasing their investment in education, children coming from landless families saw wages grow in the market for child labor thereby reducing their incentive to go to school.

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