El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala count among today's most violent countries of the world. Qualitative research has claimed that large-scale deportations of Central American convicts have played an important role for the spread of gangs and rampant violence in the region. Using a novel...

The assumption that remittances are a substitute for credit has been an implicit or explicit theoretical foundation of many empirical studies on remittances. This paper directly tests this assumption by comparing the response to health-related shocks among national and transnational households...

In policy discussions, it has frequently been claimed that migrants' remittances could function as a "catalyst" for financial access among receiving households. This paper provides empirical evidence on this hypothesis from Mexico, a major receiver of remittances worldwide. Using the Mexican...

In policy discussions, it has frequently been claimed that migrants' remittances could function as a 'catalyst' for financial access among receiving households. This paper provides empirical evidence on this hypothesis from Mexico, a main receiver of remittances worldwide. Using the Mexican...

This paper tests for the assumption that remittances are a substitute for credit by comparing the response to health-related shocks among national and transnational households using Mexican household panel data. While the occurrence of serious health shocks that required hospital treatment...