Economia

Resumen: Este artículo estudia la auto-selección en características educativas de mexicanos que emigran a Estados Unidos. Esto se hace para determinar la auto-selección educativa, los cambios en la autoselección en la década de los noventa, así como el cambio en la autoselección en términos de la distribución de salarios. El artículo aplica técnicas econométricas que controlan por el sesgo que genera el uso de muestras endógenas. Los cuatro principales resultados del artículo son: primero, la autoselección en los noventa era intermedia; segundo, la autoselección en el 2000 pasó a los extremos de cero años y 17 años o más; tercero, dichos grupos son los que experimentaron el crecimiento más importante durante los novena y, cuarto, es que a pesar de los cambios en la distribución de educación de mexicanos en Estados Unidos, la auto-selección en términos de la distribución salarial cambió en los noventa fundamentalmente hacia una selección intermedia.

Recent evidence suggests that Mexicans immigrating to the US are drawn from the top or medium part of the education distribution. This finding contradicts the standard migration model which predicts that, because Mexico has more wage inequality and higher returns to education, low-skill and low-education workers are more likely to migrate. This investigation develops and estimates a model with three potential explanations: decreasing migration costs in education, different relations between education and employment in the two countries, and differential availability of informal social insurance. The results reveal that migration costs can not explain the reversal in selection. The research also finds that increases in the employment probability of the US and decreases in Mexico raise the migration probability, especially for the more educated. However, the greater migration of high education workers is driven primarily by the fact that low-education workers suffer a much greater loss of informal social insurance when they migrate to the US.

Current empirical studies on immigration of Mexicans to the US have failed to obtain whether Mexicans are positively or negatively selected from the Education distribution from Mexico, either due to lack of representa-tive data or because of the use of wrong econometric ...

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

The assumption that remittances are a substitute for credit has been an implicit or explicit theoretical foundation of many empirical studies on remittances. This paper directly tests this assumption by comparing the response to health-related shocks among national and transnational households using panel data from Mexico for 2002 and 2005. 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.

While recent literature has pointed out that migrants’ remittances have a positive impact on savings with financial institutions, findings with respect to access to and the use of loans have been ambiguous. This paper investigates whether the reception of remittances facilitates taking up loans from formal or informal sources among Mexican households and finds positive and statistically significant effects of remittances on borrowing and on the existence of debts. 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.

This paper analyzes the impact of international remittances on household investment and poverty using panel data (2000 and 2007) from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS). Using a three-stage conditional logit model with instrumental variables to control for selection and endogeneity, it finds that households receiving remittances in 2007 spend more at the margin on one key consumption good (food) and more at the margin on one important investment good (education) compared to what they would have spent on these goods without the receipt of remittances. Using a bivariate probit model with random effects to control for selection and simultaneity, the paper also finds that households receiving remittances are less likely to be poor compared to a situation in which they did not receive remittances. These findings are important because they show that households can use remittances to help build human capital and to reduce poverty in remittance-receiving countries.

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This paper 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, this study finds that households receiving remittances actually spend less at the margin on consumptionfood 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, this paper 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.

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 main receiver of remittances worldwide. Using the Mexican Family Life Survey panel (MxFLS) for 2002 and 2005, the results from the treatment-effect-model at household level show that a change in remittance status has an important impact on ownership of savings accounts and the availability of borrowing options. This effect is significant for rural, but not for urban households and important for microfinance institutions, but not for traditional banks.

We investigate political determinants of land reform implementation in the Indian state of West Bengal. Using a village panel spanning 1974–1998, we do not find evidence supporting the hypothesis that land reforms were positively and monotonically related to control of local governments by a Left Front coalition vis-à-vis the right-centrist Congress party, combined with lack of commitment to policy platforms. Instead, the evidence is consistent with a quasi-Downsian theory stressing the role of opportunism (reelection concerns) and electoral competition.(JEL D72, O13, O17, Q15)

This paper finds that minimumwagesof the United States and Mexicomeasured carefully in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) help explain the well-documented post-2010 fall in Mexico-U.S.migration. Declining inequality also plays a role since the purchasing power of the minimum wage increased relative to the average wage in Mexico. Using time-series data,we find two positive partial correlations between minimum wages and net migration: one driven by wage differentials between the two countries and the other by wage inequality in Mexico. However, these results are found to be mediated through migrantsocial networks. Though relative wages are a classic migration driver,this paper is the first to explore the full minimum-average wagenexus. One clear policy implication of these results is that maintaining the real purchasing power of minimum wages helps reducemigration.An in-depth analysis is needed to demonstrate the causality of these correlations.

In this paper we formulate a dynamic model of migration decisions of Mexican workers, who can migrate to the US illegally or legally, try to become legal immigrants (if they are illegal), or return back to Mexico at any time. The model explains migration flows by the accumulation of location-specific human capital. This paper estimates the models behavioral parameters using data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP), a longitudinal dataset that contains information for location, legal status, income, and several socio-demographic variables. The models predicted migration transitions are matched with the migration transitions observed in the data. Then, this paper uses the models estimated parameters to evaluate the response of migration rates to a number counterfactual scenarios, which include possible policy interventions: (i) increasing legal and illegal migration costs from Mexico to the US,(ii) increasing the cost of becoming legal once in the US, (iii) giving Mexican immigrants a return subsidy, (iv) an improvement of the Mexican labor market and a worsening of the US labor market. Some combinations of these policies, such as increasing the cost of illegal immigration while simultaneously reducing the cost of legal immigration, are also analyzed.

The objective of this paper is to obtain the impact of the components of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) on the entrepreneurial intention of university students. Using a sample of 336 students from a Technological University in the State of Puebla, México, we calculate four components of Planned Behavior that measure Attitude (AT), Subjective and Social Norms (SSN), Perceived Behavioral Control (PBC), and Attraction to Entrepreneurship (AE). We apply four methodologies to obtain the impact of the treatment of obtaining high scores in the TPB on entrepreneurial intention, using as identification assumption that individuals cannot control the intensity of the score they achieve. Our results show that the PBC is the most important element of TPB in predicting entrepreneurship intentions. The main limitation is that our results apply only for university students in Puebla, Mexico. Our main contribution is the obtention of TPB’s causal impact.