Taking One for the Team: Shocks at Destination and Households' Supply of Migrants

Gustavo Fajardo, Emilio Gutierrez and Horacio Larreguy

No 1082, Research Department working papers from CAF Development Bank Of Latinamerica

Abstract: We study how unemployment shocks in the United States affect Mexican households’ migration decisions. We emphasize households at origin (as op-posed to individuals) as the decisionmaking units for migration decisions. We show that negative changes in US labor market conditions, which are diffused by household members at destination to those at origin, lead to heterogeneous migration responses by Mexican households that have members abroad. We argue that this heterogeneous response is driven by the relative magnitudes of income and substitution effects after a negative employment shock in the United States. While the income effect dominates the substitution effect for poor households, the opposite holds for richer households. These results also inform the literature on selection patterns in international migration, which suggests a new channel through which negative shocks in the host economy negatively affect the skill composition of subsequent migrants.

Keywords: Economía; Investigación socioeconómica; Trabajo y protección social (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://scioteca.caf.com/handle/123456789/1082

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dbl:dblwop:1082

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Department working papers from CAF Development Bank Of Latinamerica Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pablo Rolando ().