Remittances, exchange rates and the labor supply of Mexican Migrants in the U.S

Marc Fox and Oded Stark

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: This paper assumes that migrants derive utility from their own consumption, their own leisure, and remittances to their family. It hypothesizes that the labor supply and remittances of Mexican migrants in the U.S. are jointly determined. Shits in real exchange rates affect the cost of sending a given real volume of remittances back to the family in the sending country. This in turn induces income and substitution effects on both remittances and labor supply. It is argued that the substitution effect would dominate. Therefore, under reasonable conditions, a real depreciation of the peso should lead to an increase in both remittances and labor supply. Empirical work using U.S. Census data and a data set containing information on Mexican migrants in the U.S. lends support to the theoretical predictions.

Keywords: Mexican migrants in the U.S.; Labor supply; Remittances; Exchange rate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D11 D12 F22 F24 F31 F33 J22 J61 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1987
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/243208/1/R ... grants-in-the-US.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:esprep:243208

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().