Bilateral real exchange rates and migration - HAL-SHS - Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Applied Economics Année : 2016

Bilateral real exchange rates and migration

Résumé

Migrants who move across borders are, to a large extent, motivated by the prospect of earning higher incomes at destination, which can be partly transferred back to their countries of origin via remittances. This suggests that the real exchange rate can influence the incentives to migrate, as it determines the purchasing power of expected income in terms of the currency of the origin country. This article investigates empirically how bilateral real exchange rate fluctuations influence international migration flows. To do so, we build a dataset of 30 OECD destination countries and 165 origin countries over the period 1980–2011 and estimate an equation derived from a micro-founded random utility maximization model that allows for unobserved heterogeneity between migrants and non-migrants. Our results show that migration flows are highly responsive to bilateral real exchange rates: A 10% real appreciation of the currency of the destination country is associated with an 18.2–19.4% increase in migration flows.
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

halshs-01293438 , version 1 (24-03-2016)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-01293438 , version 1

Citer

Sekou Keita. Bilateral real exchange rates and migration. Applied Economics, 2016, 48 (31), pp.2937-2951. ⟨halshs-01293438⟩
119 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More