C. Journal articles published externally
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These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.
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Publication
Food Quality, Calories, and Household Income
(Taylor and Francis, 2011-06-24)We investigate the relationship between calories, food quality and household per capita expenditure using regression and semiparametric methods on a sample of poor households from rural Mexico, where Programa de Apoyo Alimentario (PAL), a targeted nutritional programme, is operating. The semiparametric method yields an estimate of the elasticity between calories and expenditure of 0.39 below the median and 0.28 above. The corresponding estimates of the elasticity of the calorie price are 0.48 below the median and 0.45 above. We also examine the extent to which the expenditure elasticity of the calorie price is explained by substitution between and within major food groups. We find that there is a very high incidence of substitution within cereals (especially for poor households) and that between group substitution explains at most 59% of the income elasticity for food quality. These estimates suggest that the potential of a cash transfer programme to have a positive impact on the food diversity and the nutritional status of households is quite limited. -
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Climate Variability and Child Height in Rural Mexico
( 2011)We examine the impacts of weather shocks, defined as rainfall or growing degree days, a cumulative measure of temperature, more than a standard deviation from their respective long run mean, on the stature of children between 12 and 47 months of age in Mexico. We find that after a positive rainfall shock children are shorter regardless of their region or altitude. Negative temperature shocks have a negative impact on height in the central and southern parts of the country as well as in higher altitudes. Although on average there are no statistically significant impacts from positive temperature shocks, certain sub-populations - namely boys, children between 12 and 23 months at the time of measurement, and children of less educated mothers - in some of the regions are negatively impacted. The results also suggest that potentially both agricultural income and communicable disease prevalence contribute to the effects. -
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Remittances and Banking Sector Breadth and Depth: Evidence from Mexico
( 2011)Despite the importance of remittances to developing countries, their impact on banking sector breadth and depth in recipient countries has been largely unexplored. We examine this topic using municipality-level data on the fraction of households receiving remittances and on measures of banking breadth and depth for Mexico. We find that remittances are strongly associated with greater banking breadth and depth, increasing the number of branches and accounts per capita and the amount of deposits to GDP. These effects are significant both statistically and economically, and are robust to the potential endogeneity of remittances, inclusion of a wide range of controls and even municipal fixed effects specifications using an alternative panel data set from a sample of municipalities. -
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Can Drought Increase Total Calorie Availability? The Impact of Drought on Food Consumption and the Mitigating Effects of a Conditional Cash Transfer Program
( 2010)This study uses the panel data of a randomized experiment from the Mexican PROGRESA program to evaluate the impact of drought on total calorie availability and the mitigating effects of PROGRESA on food consumption in periods of drought. Drought reduced total expenditures and total food expenditures but increased the total availability of calories. This paradox can be explained by the impact of drought on the composition of calories; that is, it reduced the consumption of expensive calories in such foods as vegetables, fruits, and animal products but increased calories consumed from cheaper sources, such as grains. This study finds that PROGRESA can completely mitigate the negative effects of drought on calorie availability from vegetables, fruits, and other sources. However, PROGRESA cannot mitigate the impact of drought on calories available from grains. The analysis also shows that, during drought, households who increase their consumption of grains get them mainly from purchased sources rather than from home production. In these circumstances, decreased total expenditures and increased purchases of grains suggest that grains are inferior goods in rural Mexico. The Engel curve analysis further proves that grains are inferior goods. -
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Catching Up with the Technological Frontier: Micro-level Evidence on Growth and Convergence
( 2010)In this article, we study how firm heterogeneity influences productivity catching up using plant-level data from Mexico. The article addresses three issues: first, it evaluates the process of convergence towards the global versus the local technological frontier in a middle-income country such as Mexico. Second, it systematically evaluates the role of technological efforts in determining the speed of convergence towards each of these technological frontiers. Third, it assesses the role of openness and trade integration in determining the speed of convergence and presents a horse race between integration and technological effort in explaining the determinants of heterogeneity in influencing the process of convergence toward both the domestic and the global technological frontier. Our results suggest that building firm-level technological capabilities is important for catching up with the global frontier. A policy focused on trade alone will facilitate convergence towards the best technological practices available locally, but it will fall short of encouraging convergence with the global frontier. -
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How Should Passenger Travel in Mexico City Be Priced?
( 2010)This paper uses an analytical-simulation model to examine the optimal pricing of the passenger transportation system in Mexico City. The model incorporates travel by auto, microbus, public bus, and rail, as well as externalities from local and global air pollution, traffic congestion, and road accidents. In our benchmark case, the optimal gasoline tax is $2.72 per gallon, or 16 times the current tax. However, a per mile toll would reduce traffic congestion, the largest externality, more directly, and we put the optimized auto toll at 20.3 cents per mile. Tolls on microbuses also improve efficiency, though the gains are on a smaller scale, as are those from reforming public transit fares. -
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Remittances and Vulnerability to Poverty in Rural Mexico
( 2010)Remittances have been portrayed as the human face of globalization given their potential to alleviate poverty by directly increasing household income. Using a panel of rural households in Mexico from October 1998 to November 2000 this study assesses whether this is in fact the case. However, rather than examining whether remittances income would reduce future consumption poverty we asked if remittances are likely to reach people whose conditions are prone to worsen in the future. We found a negative and statistically significant relationship between the disbursement of remittances and the threat to future poverty that rural households could experience. -
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Foreign Bank Participation and Outreach : Evidence from Mexico
( 2010)Recently, developing countries have witnessed a sharp increase in foreign bank participation. We examine the impact on banking outreach using newly gathered data for Mexico, where foreign bank participation rose from 2% to 83% of assets during 1997-2005. Country-, bank-, and bank-municipality-level estimations show a decline in the number of deposit and loan accounts. While country- and bank-level estimations indicate an increase in the share of municipalities with bank branches and in the likelihood of bank presence, bank-municipality regressions show that only rich and urban municipalities benefited. Overall, the evidence is consistent with a decline in outreach. -
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Why Are Mexican American Boys So Much Taller Now?
( 2010)Using NHANES data we find that the difference in average height between non-Hispanic White and Mexican American boys of ages 2-14 years has decreased 1.7cm on average during the last quarter of the twentieth century in the United States. Our hypothesis is that the narrowing of the height gap is related to a larger gain in maternal height among Mexican Americans in relation to Whites. We estimate a child's height equation and find that on average about 38% of the reduction in the gap for boys of ages 2-5 years is attributed to this factor. The evidence of a secular trend for height is weak for the case of girls. -
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Self-Selection Patterns in Mexico-U.S. Migration: The Role of Migration Networks
( 2010)This paper examines the role of migration networks in determining self-selection patterns of Mexico-U.S. migration. A simple theoretical framework shows the impact of networks on migration incentives at different education levels and how this affects the composition of migrant skills. Empirically, we find positive or education-neutral selection in communities with weak migrant networks but negative self-selection in communities with stronger networks. This is consistent with high migration costs driving positive or intermediate self-selection, as advocated by Chiquiar and Hanson (2005), and with negative self-selection being driven by lower returns to education in the United States than in Mexico, as advocated by Borjas (1987).