This paper studies the effects of remittances from the U.S. on child labor and school attendance in recipient Mexican households. We identify these effects using the impact of the 2008-2009 U.S. recession on remittance receipts. The methodology employed is a differences-in-differences strategy...

In this paper we study the causal effect of a large expansion of publicly provided health insurance on children's academic performance using the case of Mexico. In general, access to free health insurance could improve education outcomes directly by making household members healthier or...

We provide evidence that production-side links between Mexico and U.S. manufacturing sectors became stronger after NAFTA was enacted and, as a consequence, business cycles in these countries became more synchronized. This suggests that the positive effect of bilateral trade on business cycle...

The results in Chiquiar and Ramos-Francia (2005) suggested that the long-run relationship between the US’s and Mexico’s manufacturing sectors was weakened after China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO). When that paper was made, however, this shock was too recent and, therefore, the...

In this paper we identify Mexico’s pattern of revealed comparative advantages within manufacturing trade flows during the 1996-2005 period. We define a basket of competing countries, according to the degree of similarity of each country’s comparative advantage pattern with that of Mexico. We...

When monetary policy has an explicit inflation target, observed inflation should be a stationary process. In countries where, for a variety of reasons, the determinants of inflation could lead it to follow a non-stationary process, the adoption of an inflation targeting framework should...

We analyze if the pattern of comparative advantages and the recent behavior of Mexican manufacturing exports, vis-à-vis its closest competitors, are related with productivity differentials or with differences in factor endowments. The relative abundance of relatively unskilled labor in Mexico...

This note studies the causal relationship that may exist between the producer price index (PPI) and the consumer price index (CPI). In contrast with previous international studies, the results suggest that, in the case of Mexico, information on the PPI seems to be useful to improve forecasts of...

We address the role that deep, structural factors may have as determinants of Mexico’s economic growth. We argue that Mexico’s poor growth performance appears to be associated not only with shorter-run events such as the "lost decade" of the eighties, but also with supply-side features of...

The formal Mexican labor market has shown important changes in the last five years: the employment in the industry has been decreasing whereas the employment in the service sector has been increasing. This study looks at the consequence of such changes on the aggregate productivity of the formal...