Migration, violence and welfare programmes in rural Colombia

This paper studies migration decisions of very poor households in an environment with a high level of violence. By matching detailed retrospective data on violence levels in Colombian rural municipalities with a household survey collected for the evaluation of the "Familias en Acción" welfare programme, the empirical analysis takes into account possible selection problems of the sample and the key issue of endogeneity of violence. The main results show that high levels of violence encourage households to leave their municipality of residence but that welfare programmes may mitigate these flows, provided that the incidence of violence is not unduly high. This is consistent with the fact that the households under study are liquidity constrained: when violence is high, cash transfers may enable them to leave their municipality of residence, whereas, in more normal circumstances, receiving cash transfers increases the benefits to stay where they are registered. Further evidence using household shocks and wealth confirm that liquidity constraints play a large role in explaining such heterogeneous impacts of the programme along violence levels. Other important determinants of migration are the type of property rights and the health insurance rural households can benefit from.migration, welfare programme, violence, displacement, Colombia

Are boys and girls affected differently when the household head leaves for good? Evidence from school and work choices in Colombia

This paper investigates how the permanent departure of the head from the household, mainly due to death or divorce, affects children's school enrolment and work participation in rural Colombia. In our empirical specification we use household-level fixed effects to deal with the fact that households that experience the departure of the head are likely to differ in unobserved ways from those that do not, and we also address the issue of non-random attrition from the panel. We find remarkably different effects for boys and girls. For boys, the adverse event reduces school participation and increases participation in paid work, whereas for girls we find evidence of the adverse event having a beneficial impact on schooling. To explain these differences, we provide evidence for boys consistent with the head's departure having an important effect through the income reduction associated with it, whereas for girls, changes in the household decision-maker appear to play an important role.Child labour; schooling; adverse event; income loss; credit and insurance market failures; bargaining

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 human smugglers by eroding their profits but it necessarily increases immigration. In contrast, re-enforced repression decreases migration but uses the help of cartelized smugglers. To overcome this trade-off we study how legalisation and repression can be combined to eliminate human smuggling while controlling migration flows. This policy mix also has the advantage that the funds raised by visa sales can be used to finance additional investments in border and internal controls (employer sanctions and deportations). Simulations of the policy implications highlight the complementarities between repression and legalisation and call into question the current policies.migration, migration policies, market structure, legalisation, human smuggling.

Migration, violence and welfare in rural Colombia

This paper studies migration decisions of very poor households in a context of high level of violence. Our estimates show that high levels of violence encourage households to leave their municipality of residence and that welfare programmes such as conditional cash transfer programmes may mitigate these flows, provided the incidence of violence is not unduly high. Other important determinants of migration are the type of property rights and social insurance rural households can benefit from

Ethnic parity in labour market outcomes for benefit claimants

We use UK administrative data to estimate the differential in labour market outcomes between Ethnic Minority benefit claimants and otherwise identical Whites. In many cases, Minorities and Whites are simply too different for satisfactory estimates to be calculated and results are sensitive to the methodology used. This calls into question previous results based on simple regression techniques, which may hide the fact that observationally different ethnic groups are being compared by parametric extrapolation. For some groups, however, we could calculate satisfactory results. In these cases, large and significant raw penalties almost always disappear once we appropriately control for pre-inflow characteristics.Ethnic, employment, benefit, discrimination, matching

Ethnic parity in labour market outcomes for benefit claimants in Great Britain

Accurate estimates of the extent of ethnic parity amongst benefit claimants are very important for policymakers who provide interventions for these groups. We use new administrative data on benefit claimants in Great Britain to document differences in labour market outcomes between Ethnic Minority and White claimants, both before and after controlling for rich observable characteristics. We do so using a variety of methods, from OLS to propensity score matching to difference-in-differences. We find that, in many cases, Minorities and Whites are simply too different for satisfactory estimates to be calculated, and that results are sensitive to the methodology used. This calls into question previous results based on simple regression techniques, which may hide the fact that observationally different ethnic groups are being compared by parametric extrapolation. For Income Support and Incapacity Benefit claimants, however, we could calculate satisfactory results. For these groups, large and significant raw penalties almost always disappear once we appropriately control for pre-inflow characteristics.Non-response, bias, school survey, data linkage, PISA