That the job market in Phoenix can affect a child’s education in Mexico may strain credulity, but it’s nevertheless true, according to a recent paper co-authored by Brian Cadena, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of economics.
That the job market in Phoenix can affect a child’s education in Mexico may strain credulity, but it’s nevertheless true, according to a recent paper co-authored by Brian Cadena, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of economics.
People from specific regions in Mexico tend to migrate to specific regions in the United States, and when U.S. work dries up in some areas, those migrants tend to return to Mexico, Cadena and his co-authors, María Esther Caballero of American University and Brian K. Kovak of Carnegie Mellon, found.
Their paper, published in the Journal of International Economics in November, explores the U.S. labor market’s influence on the lives of people in Mexico by comparing how neighboring Mexican counties, or “municipios,” fared during the Great Recession.
To perform their analysis, Cadena, Caballero and Kovak drew upon data from the Matrícula Consular de Alta Seguridad (MCAS), a governmental organization that issues identity cards to Mexican migrants.
Unlike either the U.S. or Mexican census, MCAS provides in-depth, granular information on migrant workers, specifying the municipios they leave and where in the United States they settle.
MCAS is a treasure trove, says Cadena. But it wasn’t long ago that researchers didn’t know how to use it. Cadena, Caballero and Kovak changed that with another paper they published in 2018, which validated the MCAS data and thereby opened up a whole range of potential research.
“This identity-card data really allowed us to drill down and make tight comparisons between municipios,” says Cadena.
