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The paper develops a general framework for the analysis of environmental shocks in growing economies. Endogenous capital investments allow identifying the dual role of capital as a buffer against shocks and a source of pollution. We study the effects of recurring natural disasters on optimal growth and efficient environmental policies. Emissions may cause continuous fluctuations, entail discrete and recurring jumps, or trigger so-called "tipping points" with large costs to the economy. Closed-form solutions are provided for all the model variants. We discuss possible applications in environmental economics and identify current research gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary There are two seemingly competing branches of the literature on saving and duration-of-stay decisions of temporary migrants. One relies on the target-saving explanation and the other on utility maximization over a life cycle. We attempt to reconcile the two approaches within a framework where a migrant has a well-defined savings target (in planning to purchase a new home at origin) but also chooses the time of return and the consumption path to maximize lifetime utility. Our analysis highlights the role of property investment and savings repatriation in the relationship between temporary migration and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Savings of guest workers as well as of undocumented migrants represent important inflows of foreign exchange for some developing countries. This paper compares the saving behavior of these two types of migrants, assuming that the former are authorized to work abroad for a specific period of time, while the latter can stay until apprehended and deported by the immigration authorities. Due to the risk of deportation, the saving rate of an illegal immigrant is found to be initially above that of a documented migrant. This precautionary saving phenomenon is, however, short-lived. A key finding of the paper is that the total repatriated assets of an illegal migrant are always lower than those of a documented worker, provided that their duration of stay abroad is identical. This is because the undocumented migrant's saving rate falls over time as her expected lifetime earnings are adjusted upwards every day that she avoids apprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]