An Empirical Examination of the Factors Affecting Remittance by Mexican Migrants in the United States

Mexico has reported workers remittances to equal $16.6 billion in 2004, which constitutes nearly 2.5 percent of Mexicos GDP, exceeding the inflows from direct foreign investment and aid. We develop a model of remittances based on a net income concept. The model is used to generate a series of testable hypotheses. We test these hypotheses using what we term a type II generalized ordered probit model based on survey data for Mexican Migrants. Our results are generally consistent with standard utility maximization theory, and more specifically are consistent with a net income hypothesis. we find, for example, that migrant income is a strong positive determinant of remittance levels except for the lowest remittance category. We also find that migrants remit more when they have more family members in Mexico and fewer in the U.S., when they own land and real estate in Mexico, and when they plan on returning to Mexico relatively soon.Labor and Human Capital,

Purchasing power parity in African countries: evidence from panel SURADF test

This study reexamines the validity of long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis using a battery of panel unit root tests for 11 developing countries in Africa over the period 1980-2007. Based on the conventional panel unit root tests, we found evidence that the monthly real exchange rates in these countries were mean reverting. By contrast, the series-specific unit root test proposed by Breuer et al. (SURADF) reveals that only six of the 11 RERs series were stationary using the US dollar as reference currency. Additionally, our results reveal that there is stronger evidence of the parity condition with the Rand-based rates than in the other currency-based rates like the US dollar or Euro.We conclude that PPP holds in some, but not all, of the African countries according to the SURADF tests

Do Bilateral Investment Treaties Deliver the Goods? Evidence from Developing Countries.

Bilateral investment treaties (BITs), signed by developing countries explicitly state the objective of promoting foreign direct investment (FDI). The rapid increase in the number of BITs and the concurrent increase in worldwide flows of FDI between 1980 and 2003 suggest that BITs are an effective strategy toward this goal. Recent studies provide some empirical support for this link. However, FDI flows into specific countries from 1980 to 2003 reveals the puzzling behavior for flows to increase soon after country starts signing BITs, followed by fluctuations with either a downward trend or no noticeable trend at all. Our main contribution is to explain this behavior by explicitly incorporating the impact of treaty violations, as evidenced by treaty disputes arbitrated by the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, on FDI flows. We find that while BITs are effective in attracting investment, disputes tend to decrease future investment flows