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Countries with strict immigration policies often resort to deportation measures to reduce their stocks of illegal immigrants. Many of their undocumented foreign workers, however, are not deported but rather choose to return home voluntarily. This paper studies the optimizing behavior of undocumented immigrants who continuously face the risk of deportation, modeled by a stochastic process, and must decide how long to remain in the host country. It is found that the presence of uncertainty with respect to the length of stay abroad unambiguously reduces the desired migration duration and may trigger a voluntary return when a permanent stay would otherwise be optimal. Voluntary return is motivated by both economic and psychological factors. Calibration of the model to match the evidence on undocumented Thai migrants in Japan suggests that the psychological impact of being abroad as an illegal alien may be equivalent to as large as a 68 % cut in the consumption rate at the point of return., Journal of Population Economics, 29 (3), ISSN:0933-1433, ISSN:1432-1475

This paper analyzes how banks' funding constraints impact the access and cost of capital of small firms. Banks raise external finance from a large number of small investors who face co-ordination problems and invest in small, risky businesses. When investors observe noisy signals about the true implementation cost of real sector projects, the model can be solved for a threshold equilibrium in the classical global games approach. We show that a "socially optimal" interest rate that maximizes the probability of success of the small firm is higher than the risk-free rate, because higher interest rates relax the bank's funding constraint. However, banks will generally set an interest rate higher than this socially optimal one. This gives rise to a built-in inefficiency of banking intermediation activity that can be corrected by various policy measures.

This paper develops a simple model showing how banks can increase the access to finance of small, risky firms by mitigating coordination problems among investors. If investors observe a biased signal about the true implementation cost of real sector projects, the model can be solved for a switching equilibrium in the classical global games approach. We show that the socially optimal interest rate that maximizes the probability of success of the firm is higher than the risk-free rate. Yet if banks maximize investors' expected return, they would choose an interest higher than the socially optimal one. This gives rise to a form of credit rationing, which stems from the funding constraints of the banks., Nous étudions le financement des PME par les banques dans un modèle de type "global games". Il apparait que le taux d'intérêt d'équilibre dans une économie décentralisée avec secteur bancaire concurrentiel est supérieur au taux d'intérêt qui assure le plus grand taux de réussite des projets.