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The structure of an economy in the framework of the Input-Output (IO) model is defined by the set of industries within, together with the set of existing links between those industries, the latter determined by the demand and supply of intermediate goods exerted by the producers. Such a structure can be characterized by a subset of those connections between industries, regarded as the essential substructure, whose analysis allows learning some of the fundamental features of the system at large. This paper presents a qualitative method to find that essential productive structure, employing endogenous IO information only. Furthermore, the proposed method has been used to compare two such structures, namely, the United States and Mexico. Results assign structural positions to each sector in each system and describe the way industries influence one another in each economy. As expected, those results confirm that these economies are structurally different, despite existing similarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on micro-level data to fully inform the debate on decentralization and regional development. Using labor-income trajectories of emigrants from Mexico City, the paper analyzes how the labor market in a regional city, Leon, evolves. Results from the econometric model suggest that migrants’ labor-income trajectories differ between the large agglomeration and the regional city in an early stage of the evolution of the labor market, but converge in a later stage. Specifically, the slope of the earning function for recent migrants is steeper and statistically different from the slope for early migrants. The findings presented in this paper enrich the existing theory by providing microfoundations to a typically macroeconomic area of research and enable policy makers to better understand the processes underpinning the evolution of regional labor markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The estimation of gravity models of internal (aggregate) place-to-place migration is plagued with endogeneity (omitted-variable) biases if the unobserved effects of spatial structure are not accounted for. To address this econometric problem, this paper presents a more general specification of the gravity model, which allows for (bilateral) parameter heterogeneity across individual migration paths-along with (unilateral) origin- and destination-specific effects. The resultant 'three-way fixed-effects' (3FE) model is applied for an analysis of interstate migration in Mexico based on cross-sectional data. To overcome parameter-dimensionality problems (due to limited or incomplete information), the 3FE model is estimated using the Generalized Maximum Entropy (GME) estimator. The empirical implications of this new modeling strategy are illustrated by contrasting the 3FE-GME estimates with those for the traditional and two-way fixed-effects (2FE) models. The former are far more plausible and intuitively interpretable than their traditional and 2FE counterparts, with parameter estimates changing in expected directions. The (average) effect of the migrant stock is markedly smaller than usually estimated, providing a more realistic measure of network-induced migration. Migration outflows from centrally located origins have significantly steeper distance decay. Path-specific distance effects exhibit directional asymmetries and spatial similarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using 1990 and 2000 U.S. census data, this study investigates changes in immigrant/native earnings disparities for workers in U.S. cities along the international border with Mexico vis-à-vis the U.S. interior during the 1990s. Our findings—based on estimating earnings functions and employing the Juhn-Murphy-Pierce (1993, JPE) wage decomposition technique—indicate that the average earnings of Mexican immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border improved relative to those accrued by their counterparts in the U.S. interior and by otherwise similar U.S.-born Mexican Americans between 1990 and 2000. However, when comparing Mexican-born workers to U.S.-born non-Hispanic whites, the immigrant border-earnings penalty remained statistically unchanged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]