This paper analyzes how enforcement along the U.S.-Mexican border has affected the market for migrant smugglers. Using a unique dataset that links border crossing histories from illegal Mexican migrants to aggregate enforcement and punishment statistics, we find that the effect of enforcement on...

Maquiladora assembly emerged to solve a specific problem in a specific region. In the mid 1960s, it was designed to absorb unemployment and to foster industrialization at the US-Mexican border. In the course of its development, it developed considerable dynamics with respect to both regional...

We develop a new general equilibrium model of trade with heterogeneous firms, variable demand elasticities and endogenously determined wages. Trade integration favors wage convergence, intensifies competition, and forces the least efficient firms to leave the market, thereby affecting aggregate...

Engel and Rogers (1996) find that crossing the US-Canada border can considerably raise relative price volatility and that exchange rate fluctuations explain about one-third of the volatility increase. In re-evaluating the border effect, this study shows that cross-country heterogeneity in price...

Using data from the US commodity flow surveys, we show that the historical Union-Confederacy border lowers contemporaneous trade between US states by about 16 percentrelative to trade flows within the former alliances. Amongst one million placebos, thereis no other constellation of state...

The great recession of 2008-2009 resulted in a large fall in trade relative to output. Real trade fell roughly three times more than real GDP in the U.S. and Mexico, and by a factor of five in Canada. The decline in trade and output was particularly large in sectors with high levels of...

Using data on border enforcement and macroeconomic indicators from the United States and Mexico, we estimate a two-country business cycle model of labor migration and remittances. The model matches the cyclical dynamics of unskilled migration and documents the insurance role of remittances in...

In this paper we examine the issue of asymmetry in the return and volatility spillover effects from the US equity market into the Canadian and Mexican equity markets. We model the conditional volatility of the returns in each of the three markets using the asymmetric power model of Ding, Granger...