Sale of visas: a smuggler's final song?

Is there a way of eliminating human smuggling? We set up a model to simultaneously determine the provision of human smuggling services and the demand from would-be migrants. A visa-selling policy may be successful at eliminating smugglers by eroding their profits but it also increases immigration. In contrast, repression decreases migration but fuels cartelized smugglers. To overcome this trade-off we show that legalisation through selling visas in combination with repression can be used to eliminate human smuggling while controlling migration flows. Simulations of the policy highlight the complementarities between repression and selling visas and call into question current policies

Opera CD Project

The library has a significant amount of materials on-site. For pleasure or for simply completing assigned work, our library has the resources to help students and staff. The library continually has to keep updating its equipment and technical materials like CDs and IPADS. Otherwise, the technology would be outdated and less useful, if useful at all. [excerpt

Asymmetry of Information within Family Networks

This paper studies asymmetry of information and transfers within 712 extended family networks from Tanzania. Using cross-reports on asset holdings, we construct measures of mis-perception of living standards among households within the same network. We contrast altruism, pressure, exchange and risk sharing as motives to transfer in simple models with asymmetric information. Testing the model predictions in the data uncovers the active role played by recipients of transfers. Our findings suggest that recipients set the terms of the transfers, either by exerting pressure on donors or because they hold substantial bargaining power in their exchange relationships

Guest Workers in the Underground Economy

Guest-worker programs have been providing rapidly growing economies with millions of temporary foreign workers over the last couple of decades. With the duration of stay strictly limited by program rules in most of the host countries and wages paid to guest workers often set at sub-market levels, many of the migrants choose to overstay and seek employment in the underground economy. This paper develops a general-equilibrium model that relates the flow of guest workers transiting to the underground economy to the rules of the program, enforcement measures of the host country and market conditions facing migrants at home and abroad

Food and cash transfers: evidence from Colombia

We study food Engel curves among the poor population targeted by a conditional cash transfer programme in Colombia. After controlling for the endogeneity of total expenditure and for the (unobserved) variability of prices across villages, the best fit is provided by a log-linear specification. Our estimates imply that an increase in total expenditure by 10% would lead to a decrease of 1% in the share of food. However, quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of the programme on total and food consumption show that the share of food increases, suggesting that the programme has more complex impacts than increasing household income. In particular, our results are not inconsistent with the hypothesis that the programme, targeted to women, could increase their bargaining power and induce a more than proportional increase in food consumption

To Control Migration Flows and Defeat Human Smuggling, Sell Visas

Policymakers in most OECD countries face the challenge that they must fight people smuggling while retaining control of migration flows. Policies designed to increase border controls are not sufficient on their own; the level of enforcement that would eliminate people smuggling entirely would be extremely costly. Further, these policies have unintended consequences in the people smuggling market; they increase the fees charged by smugglers, increase reliance on their services, and increase their cartellization. By contrast, a visa-selling policy can weaken smugglers by decreasing their prices and squeezing their profits. However, eliminating people smuggling only in this way requires cheap visas and necessarily leads to a rise in the numbers of people migrating. An innovative policy of selling visas combined with enforced sanctions on employers and employees for illegal working can control migration flows and put smugglers out of business. Using the revenue generated to finance enforcement allows visa prices to be set at a high level that controls migration flows

How effective are conditional cash transfers? Evidence from Colombia

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes are becoming an extremely popular tool for improving the education and health outcomes of poor children in developing countries. An incomplete list of countries in which they are being implemented under the support of the World Bank and other international financial institutions includes Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, Brazil, Turkey and Mozambique. While the implementation details vary from country to country, many are modelled on the Mexican PROGRESA. In a typical CCT, mothers from poor backgrounds receive cash conditional on their promoting certain activities on behalf of their children. For their youngest children - usually those below the age of 6 - the conditionality involves visits to preventive healthcare centres in which their growth is monitored. School attendance is the most common stipulation for receipt of cash transfers for older children - usually those between 7 and 17 years old. This targeting of health and education of children is at the essence of the long-term poverty alleviation objective of CCT programmes. Such transfer programmes are also aimed at the short-term reduction of poverty, through the provision of immediate funds to indigent households. In this Briefing Note, we will focus on the programme Familias en Acción (FA), the CCT implemented by the Colombian government from 2001/02. In particular, we will provide estimates of how the programme has influenced key welfare indicators such as school attendance, child nutrition and health status, as well as household consumption. In this respect, we will update the preliminary results that were reported in Attanasio et al. (2003 and 2004)

Child education and work choices in the presence of a conditional cash transfer programme in rural Colombia

This research is part of a large evaluation effort, undertaken by a consortium formed by IFS, Econometria and SEI, which has considered the effects of Familias en Accion on a variety of outcomes one year after its implementation. In early reports, we focussed on the effects of the programme on school enrolment. In this paper, we both expand those results, by carefully analysing anticipation effects along with other issues, and complement them with an analysis of child labour - both paid and unpaid (including domestic) work. The child labour analysis is made possible due to a rich time use module of the surveys that has not previously been analysed. We find that the programme increased the school participation rates of 14 to 17 year old children quite substantially, by between 5 and 7 percentage points, and had lower, but non-negligible effects on the enrolment of younger children of between 1.4 and 2.4 percentage points. In terms of work, the effects are generally largest for younger children whose participation in domestic work decreased by around 10 to 12 percentage points after the programme but whose participation in income-generating work remained largely unaffected by the programme. We also find evidence of school and work time not being fully substitutable, suggesting that some, but not all, of the increased time at school may be drawn from children's leisure time