The Impact of Migration on Family Left Behind

This paper addresses the effects of migration on families left behind and offers new evidence on the impact of migration on elderly parents. After discussing the identification issues involved in estimation, I review the literature on the effects of migration on the education and health of non-migrant children as well as the labor supply of non-migrant spouses. Finally, I address the impact of adult child migration on contributions toward non-migrant parents as well as the effects on parental health. Results show that elderly parents receive lower time contributions from all of their children when one child migrates.migration, left behind, elderly, children

Forced sloshing of inviscid fluids

Forced sloshing motion of inviscid fluids in rigid cylinder

Poverty traps and nonlinear income dynamics with measurement error and individual heterogeneity

Theories of poverty traps stand in sharp contrast to the view that anybody can make it through hard work and thrift. However, empirical detection of poverty traps is complicated by the lack of long panels, measurement error, and attrition. This paper shows how dynamic pseudo-panel methods can overcome these difficulties, allowing estimation of non-linear income dynamics and testing for the presence of poverty traps. The paper explicitly allows for individual heterogeneity in income dynamics to account for the possibility that particular groups of individuals may face traps, even if the average individual does not. These methods are used to examine the evidence for a poverty trap in labor earnings, income, and expenditure in Mexico and are compared to panel data estimates from a short rotating panel. The results do find evidence of nonlinearities in household income dynamics and demonstrate large bias in the panel data estimates. Nevertheless, even after allowing for heterogeneity and accounting for measurement error, the paper finds no evidence of the existence of a poverty trap for any group in the sample.Inequality,Services&Transfers to Poor,Economic Theory&Research,Economic Conditions and Volatility,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis

Earnings mobility and measurement error : a pseudo-panel approach

The degree of mobility in incomes is often seen as an important measure of the equality of opportunity in a society and of the flexibility and freedom of its labor market. But estimation of mobility using panel data is biased by the presence of measurement error and non-random attrition from the panel. This paper shows that dynamic pseudo-panel methods can be used to consistently estimate measures of absolute and conditional mobility in the presence of non-classical measurement errors. These methods are applied to data on earnings from a Mexican quarterly rotating panel. Absolute mobility in earnings is found to be very low in Mexico, suggesting that the high level of inequality found in the cross-section will persist over time. However, the paper finds conditional mobility to be high, so that households are able to recover quickly from earnings shocks. These findings suggest a role for policies which address underlying inequalities in earnings opportunities.Inequality,Housing&Human Habitats,Roads&Highways,Economic Theory&Research,Rural Poverty Reduction

Qualitative properties of large buckled states of spherical shells

A system of 6th-order quasi-linear Ordinary Differential Equations is analyzed to show the global existence of axisymmetrically buckled states. A surprising nodal property is obtained which shows that everywhere along a branch of solutions that bifurcates from a simple eigenvalue of the linearized equation, the number of simultaneously vanishing points of both shear resultant and circumferential bending moment resultant remains invariant, provided that a certain auxiliary condition is satisfied

The impact of migration on family left behind

This paper addresses the effects of migration on families left behind and offers new evidence on the impact of migration on elderly parents. After discussing the identification issues involved in estimation, I review the literature on the effects of migration on the education and health of non-migrant children as well as the labor supply of non-migrant spouses. Finally, I address the impact of adult child migration on contributions toward non-migrant parents as well as the effects on parental health. Results show that elderly parents receive lower time contributions from all of their children when one child migrates

Spatial chaos of an extensible conducting rod in a uniform magnetic field

The equilibrium equations for the isotropic Kirchhoff rod are known to form an integrable system. It is also known that the effects of extensibility and shearability of the rod do not break the integrable structure. Nor, as we have shown in a previous paper does the effect of a magnetic field on a conducting rod. Here we show, by means of Mel'nikov analysis, that, remarkably, the combined effects do destroy integrability; that is, the governing equations for an extensible current-carrying rod in a uniform magnetic field are nonintegrable. This result has implications for possible configurations of electrodynamic space tethers and may be relevant for electromechanical devices

Incentives to identify: Racial identity in the age of affirmative action

It is almost universally assumed that race is an exogenously given trait that is not subject to change. But as race is most often self-reported by individuals who must weigh the costs and benefits of associating with minority groups, we ask whether racial self-identification responds to economic incentives. To address this question, we link racial self-identification with changes in state-level affirmative action policies in higher education, contracting, and employment. Consistent with supporting evidence showing that individuals from underrepresented minority groups face an incentive to identify under affirmative action, we find that once affirmative action is outlawed, they are less likely to identify with their minority group. In contrast, we find that individuals from overrepresented minority groups, who face a disincentive to identify under affirmative action, are more likely to identify with their minority group once affirmative action is banned. To our knowledge, this is the first study to document a causal relationship between racial self-identification and economic incentives in the United States. As such, it has broad implications for understanding the impact of affirmative action policies, estimating broader trends in racial disparities, and the emerging literature on the construction of race and individual identity

Discrete Formulation for the dynamics of rods deforming in space

We describe the main ingredients needed to create, from the smooth lagrangian density, a variational principle for discrete motions of a discrete rod, with corresponding conserved Noether currents. We describe all geometrical objects in terms of elements on the linear Atiyah bundle, using a reduced forward difference operator. We show how this introduces a discrete lagrangian density that models the discrete dynamics of a discrete rod. The presented tools are general enough to represent a discretization of any variational theory in principal bundles, and its simplicity allows to perform an iterative integration algorithm to compute the discrete rod evolution in time, starting from any predefined configurations of all discrete rod elements at initial times