American Economic Journal:
Applied Economics
ISSN 1945-7782 (Print) | ISSN 1945-7790 (Online)
Immigrants' Labor Supply and Exchange Rate Volatility
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
vol. 5,
no. 4, October 2013
(pp. 144–64)
Abstract
Are an immigrant's decisions affected in real time by her home country's economy? I examine this question by exploiting exchange rate variations as exogenous price shocks to immigrants' budget constraints. I find that in response to a 10 percent dollar appreciation, an immigrant decreases her earnings by 0.92 percent, mainly by reducing hours worked. The exchange rate effect is greater for recent immigrants, married immigrants with absent spouses, Mexicans close to the border, and immigrants from countries with higher remittance flows. A neoclassical interpretation of these findings suggests that the income effect exceeds the cross-substitution effect. Remittance targets offer an alternative explanation.Citation
Nekoei, Arash. 2013. "Immigrants' Labor Supply and Exchange Rate Volatility." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 5 (4): 144–64. DOI: 10.1257/app.5.4.144Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- F24 Remittances
- F31 Foreign Exchange
- J22 Time Allocation and Labor Supply
- J61 Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
There are no comments for this article.
Login to Comment