Migration, Risk and Liquidity Constraints in El Salvador

Timothy Halliday

No 200511, Working Papers from University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper utilizes panel data from El Salvador to investigate the use of trans-national migration as an ex post risk management strategy. We show that adverse agricultural conditions in El Salvador increase both migration to the US and remittances sent back to El Salvador. We show that, in the absence of any agricultural shocks, the probability that a household sent members to the US would have decreased by 24.26%, on average. We also show that the 2001 earthquakes reduced net migration to the US. A one standard deviation increase in earthquake damage reduced the average probability of northward migration by 37.11%. The evidence suggests that the effects of the earthquakes had more to do with households retaining labor at home to cope with the effects of the disaster rather than the earthquakes disrupting migration financing.

Keywords: Migration; Insurance; Liquidity Constraints (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2005, Revised 2006-03-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-rmg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (152)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economics.hawaii.edu/research/workingpapers/WP_05-11.pdf First version, 2005 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Migration, Risk, and Liquidity Constraints in El Salvador (2006)
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:hai:wpaper:200511

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.economics ... esearch/working.html

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Web Technician ().