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This paper uses newly digitized border crossing records from the early 20th century to study the destination choice of female and male French Canadian migrants to the United States. Immigrant sorting across destinations was strikingly different between women and men. Absolute returns to skill dominate in explaining sorting among men, while job search costs and access to ethnic networks were more important for single women. Married women were typically tied to a spouse whose labour market opportunities determined the joint destination, and were much less responsive to destination characteristics as a result.

Using height as a proxy for physical productivity of labour, this paper estimates the selection of Mexican migration to the United States at the beginning of the flow (1906-08), and it exploits a natural experiment of history to evaluate the impact of random shocks on short-run shifts in selection into migration. The results suggest that the first Mexican migrants belonged to the upper ranks of the height distribution of the Mexican working class. Additionally, the financial crisis of 1907, an exogenous labour demand shock in the United States, significantly modified local migrant self-selection. Before the crisis, migrants were positively selected relative to the military elite of the time. During the crisis, migrants became negatively selected, but returned to a stronger positive selection after the crisis. The shift to a less positive selection was influenced by the absence of the enganche, an institution that neutralized mobility and job-search costs. The stronger positive selection in the post-crisis period was partially driven by persistent droughts in Mexico that increased the population at risk of migration.

In 2013, Mexico's Social Pension Program for the Elderly was expanded by changing its eligibility threshold from age 70 to age 65. Using pooled cross-sectional data from Mexico's National Household Income and Expenditure Survey, the exogenous variation around eligibility age was exploited to uncover the causal effects of this expansion on extreme poverty and labor supply of the newly eligible population, and to explore potential transmission mechanisms. Applying quasi-experimental methods, results show that the expansion of Mexico's Social Pension Program for the Elderly not only reduced the probability of the elderly being extreme poor, but it also reduced the extreme poverty gap, and the extreme poverty severity indexes of the elderly population. These effects on extreme poverty are generalizable to all individuals of the treated household. The results suggest that the expansion of the Social Pension Program for the Elderly did not have short-term effects on the labor force participation of the elderly. Accordingly, the analysis does not find that the program reduced labor income. In contrast with other impact evaluations of similar programs, the analysis does not find that the expansion of Mexico's program had a crowding out effect on domestic or international private transfers to the elderly.