NBER Publications by Alejandra Cox

We examine the effect of remittances from abroad on households' schooling decisions using data for El Salvador. Following the massive war-related emigration of the 1980's, remittances became a significant source of household income throughout the 1990's. We use the Cox proportional hazard model to examine the determinants of school attendance. Measuring income from a source that is uncorrelated with parental schooling remittances , we find that remittances have a large, significant effect on school retention. We estimate that while household income net of remittances has a small, though significant, impact on the hazard of leaving school in rural and urban areas, remittances have a much larger impact on the hazard of leaving school. In urban areas, the effect of remittances is, at its...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a typology of different labor market configurations and investigate how two major structural adjustment policies, namely a trade liberalization reform and the relaxation of capital controls, affect the level of aggregate employment and the rate of unemployment. We consider a number of models starting from the traditional Australian approach. We then analyze a multiple sectors intertemporal setting and a model with uncertainty and search. We identify situations under which structural adjustment results in unemployment.