This paper relies on recent proprietary data from the People's Republic of China's (PRC) poor rural minority areas to examine the importance of credit constraints on internal labor migration. Specifically, a liquidity shock via the PRC's minimum living standard assistance (MLSA) program is...

Barriers to immigration of low-skilled workers from developing countries into the advanced countries prevent many potential migrants from leaving their countries of origin. With very low home-country wages in relation to the cost of undocumented migration, the opportunity to migrate often hinges...

This study examines the role of migrant's remittances on labor supply for a panel of Peruvian households over the period 2002-2006. Remittances can undermine the incentives to work. On the other hand, the in ows may alleviate credit constraints for poor households which may foster productive...

We exploit the 1998 and 2003 constitutional amendment in Texas—allowing home equity loans and lines of credit for non-housing purposes—as natural experiments to estimate the effect of easier credit access on the labor market. Using state-level as well as county-level data and the...

As wages in migrant sending countries catch up with those in destinations, migrants adjust on several margins, including their duration of stay, the number of migrations they undertake, as well as the amount saved while abroad. This paper combines Mexican and U.S. data to estimate a dynamic...

A migration network is modeled as a mutually beneficial cooperative agreement between financially-constrained individuals who seek to finance and expedite their migration. The cooperation agreement creates a network: “established” migrants contract to support the subsequent migration of...

We examine the effect of borrowing constraint facing new immigrants on the process of their assimilation in the new society. We shall do so in a two-period model. In period one, immigrants invest, with some costs to them, in trying to assimilate. The probability of success in this endeavor...

Using data collected for the evaluation of the rural component of Oportunidades, Mexico's flagship anti-poverty program, I show that poor households' entitlement to an exogenous, temporary but guaranteed income stream increases US migration even if this income is mainly consumed and that some...

There has been evidence on the entrepreneurial behavior of migrants in receiving countries or after they return to home countries, but little research on the entrepreneurship of left-behind persons when migrants are still abroad. Using data from the Mexican Family Life Survey, this paper...

Previous papers tested the validity of the Family Investment Hypothesis (FIH) among immigrants by comparing the labor market outcomes of immigrant couples and native or mixed couples. Here we propose an alternative test for the FIH which is based on a comparison between married and single...