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The U.S. is the largest source country of remittances with an outflow of more than $70 billion estimated for 2016 (according to data from the World Bank). This paper is the first to use Current Population Survey (CPS) data to estimate the determinants of remittances originating from the United States for a diverse set of approximately 3,800 households with at least one foreign-born worker. We employ a gravity model examining the role of various push, pull, and distance factors. Most notably, higher household earnings push monetary transfers abroad: We estimate an average earnings elasticity in the range of 0.20-0.30. Remittances are more responsive to earnings in households with more adult women relative to men.

This paper investigates the relationship between international migration, remittances and human capital investment in Kenya. We use household level data from the 2009 Kenya Migration Household Survey (produced by the Africa Migration Project) to test our hypothesis and uncover a positive and significant relationship between the amount of international remittances a household receives and the amount of expenditures allocated to education (for all levels of education). We consider various robustness checks and find that our results hold up to various specifications, including an instrumental variable approach.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the single most important transfer program in place in the United States. An aspect of the EITC that has received little attention thus far is its role as a public insurance program. Yet, the structure of the EITC necessarily protects its primary class of recipients, unskilled single mothers, against major risks they face to both wages and changes in family structure. Our study provides the first quantitative statement about the insurance provided by the EITC. We study a dynamic model of consumption, savings, and labor supply in which households face wage and demographic risk, but have only limited self-insurance capacity. We use the model to compare outcomes under the EITC to the counterfactual in which it is completely eliminated. We find that the EITC provides substantial insurance to unskilled single mothers: The program reduces consumption volatility, as measured by the coefficient of the variation, by 12 percentage points or more, even as it allows these households to save less. Importantly, this insurance provision may not be compromising incentives to work: The model suggests that the EITC increases the labor supply of unskilled single mothers substantially at the extensive margin.

With worldwide migration becoming increasingly prevalent in policy agendas over the past several decades, understanding the effects that migrants have on a host country's population continues to be an important research agenda. There is a large literature documenting the effects that migrants have on native wages, tax burden, unemployment, etc. However, very little is understood about how migrants affect the happiness, or subjective well-being, of natives. This paper uses the European Social Survey to analyze the effects of aggregate immigration inflows on the subjective well-being of native-born populations in a panel of 26 countries between 2002 and 2010. We find that recent immigrant flows have a nonlinear, yet overall positive impact on the well-being of natives. Specifically, we find that immigrant flows from two years prior have larger positive effects on natives' well-being than immigrant inflows from one year prior. Our findings are very small in magnitude and in practical application; only large immigrant flows would affect native well-being significantly.

In this paper, I will describe in detail both the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit in the U.S., including their origins, their structure, and the effects they have on the labor market and family formation. I will then discuss the macroeconomic implications of U.S. welfare reform, and then conclude by analyzing the effectiveness of the U.S. safety net (broadly defined) during the Great Recession of 2007-2008.

This paper uses a gravity model of migration to analyze how income differentials affect the flow of immigrants into U.S. states using annual data from the American Community Survey. We add to existing literature by decomposing income differentials into short- and long-term components and by focusing on newly arrived less-educated immigrants between 2000-2009. Our sample is unique in that 95 percent of our observed immigrant flows equal zero. We accommodate for the zeros by using scaled ordinary least squares, a threshold tobit model from Eaton and Tamura (1994), and the two-part model to analyze the determinants of immigration. Models that include observations with zero flow values find that recent male immigrants respond to differences in (short-term) GDP fluctuations between origin countries and U.S. states, and perhaps to (long-term) trend GDP differences as well. More specifically, short-run GDP fluctuations pull less-educated male immigrants into certain U.S. states, whereas GDP trends push less-educated male immigrants out of their countries of origin. Effects for less-educated women are less robust, as GDP coefficient magnitudes tend to be much smaller than in regressions for men.

College students now use various forms of unsecured credit such as private student loans and credit cards to finance college. Access to these credit lines and the interest rates charged on these loans can vary significantly across credit scores. In this paper, we analyze if credit status, as measured by self-reported characteristics of an individual's credit standing, affects college investment. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we study a sample of young high school graduates to estimate how three different measures of credit status affect college attainment and completion rates. After correcting for selection and endogeneity issues, we find that credit status is more important the longer the student stays in college. For example, having bad credit significantly lowers the probability of completing a four-year college degree, but has a smaller (but significant) impact on attaining some college. We find robust evidence that credit status affects the intensive margin of college investment, but is less important for the extensive margin. Our results suggest that bad credit status, which lowers the availability of unsecured credit to finance college and thereby makes college investment more expensive, significantly reduces college completion rates.