Search Results
Working Paper
Remittances, exchange rate regimes, and the Dutch disease: a panel data analysis
Using disaggregated sectorial data, this study shows that rising levels of remittances have spending effects that lead to real exchange rate appreciation and resource movement effects that favor the nontradable sector at the expense of tradable goods production. These characteristics are two aspects of the phenomenon known as Dutch disease. The results further indicate that these effects operate more strongly under fixed nominal exchange rate regimes.
Journal Article
Transnationalism: living in two worlds
Many immigrants vote, invest, and support families back home while starting businesses, establishing churches, and joining parent-teacher associations in the United States. Today savvy organizations recognize this growing transnationalism and collaborate across borders to reduce problems in two countries simultaneously.
Working Paper
Immigration, remittances and business cycles
We use data on border enforcement and macroeconomic indicators from the U.S. and Mexico to estimate a two-country business cycle model of labor migration and remittances. The model matches the cyclical dynamics of labor migration to the U.S. and documents how remittances to Mexico serve an insurance role to smooth consumption across the border. During expansions in the destination economy, immigration increases with the expected stream of future wage gains, but it is dampened by a sunk migration cost that reflects the intensity of border enforcement. During recessions, established migrants ...
Working Paper
Business cycles and remittances: can the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition provide new evidence?
In this paper, I analyze the business cycle properties of remittances and output series for three pairs of countries: United States-Mexico, United States-El Salvador, and Germany-Turkey. Using an unobserved components state-space model (via the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition), I decompose the remittances and output series into stochastic permanent and cyclical components. I then use the resulting stationary cyclical components to estimate co-movements between remittances and output series. Empirical results indicate that remittances are countercyclical with all the home countries: Mexico, El ...
Newsletter
Remittances and the unbanked
Conference Paper
The trade, migration, and development nexus
This paper deals with migrants' role in stimulating development in their countries of origin, outlining the three major channels through which migration can affect development: recruitment, remittances, and returns. It next turns to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), assessing the relevance of the Mexico-United States migration hump for migration, trade, and development elsewhere. The paper concludes that migrants can accelerate development in their countries of origin but finds nothing mechanical or automatic about the migration and development linkage. Countries growing and ...
Conference Paper
The relationship between international migration, trade, and development: some paradoxes and findings
The interactions among trade, international migration, and economic development in migrant-sending areas are complex, and paradoxes abound. This paper summarizes global trends in world migration and remittances, discusses some paradoxes surrounding the trade-migration-development relationship, and reports findings from new research on Mexico-to-U.S. migration, using data from rural Mexico. It concludes with some thoughts about designing policies to raise the development potential of remittances in migrant-sending areas.
Journal Article
Lessons learned from the conference series: an informed discussion of financial access for immigrants
During the past two years, the Consumer and Community Affairs (CCA) division of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago held a series of conferences focused on increasing access to financial services for immigrants. The conference series was conducted under the umbrella of CCA?s Center for the Study of Financial Access for Immigrants. The primary goal of the conference series was to provide forums where individuals interested in the topic of financial services access for immigrants could share ideas, practices, and innovative approaches to meeting immigrant financial services demand. The ...
Journal Article
Conference explores remittances' economic effects
The Atlanta Fed hosted a conference to study the economic effects of remittances sent from immigrants in the United States to their native countries. A fast-growing source of income for some countries, remittances are coming under greater scrutiny from researchers.