Thitima Puttitanun

How Do Tougher Immigration Measures Affect Unauthorized Immigrants

The recent impetus of tougher immigration-related measures passed at the state level raises concerns about the impact of such measures on the migration experience, trajectory, and future plans of unauthorized immigrants. In a recent and unique survey of Mexican unauthorized immigrants interviewed upon their voluntary return or deportation to Mexico, almost a third reported experiencing difficulties in obtaining social or government services, finding legal assistance, or obtaining health care services. Additionally, half of these unauthorized immigrants reported fearing deportation. When we assess how the enactment of punitive measures against unauthorized immigrants, such as E-Verify mandates, has affected their migration experience, we find no evidence of a statistically significant association between these measures and the difficulties reported by unauthorized immigrants in accessing a variety of services. However, the enactment of these mandates infuses deportation fear, reduces interstate mobility among voluntary returnees during their last migration spell, and helps curb deportees’ intent to return to the United States in the near future.

International Public Goods and Transfer of Technology under a Globalized Intellectual Property Regime: Patent Rights and International Technology Transfer Through Direct Investment and Licensing

In this collection, distinguished economists, political scientists, and legal experts discuss the implications of the ever more globalized protection of intellectual property rights for the ability of countries to provide their citizens with such important public goods as basic research, education, public health, and sound environmental policies. Such items increasingly depend on the exercise of private rights over technical inputs and information goods, which could usher in a brave new world of accelerating technological innovation. However, higher and more harmonized levels of international intellectual property rights could also throw up high roadblocks in the path of follow-on innovation, competition, and the attainment of other social objectives. It is at best unclear who represents the public interest in negotiating forums dominated by powerful knowledge cartels. This is the first book to assess the public processes and inputs that an emerging transnational system of innovationwill need to promote technical progress, economic growth, and welfare for all participants.

Duration of Rent Extraction and the Entry Mode Decision of Multinational Enterprises

The prior literature is ambiguous about the effects of stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) on the choice of a multinational firms mode of entry into foreign markets. However, available indexes of IPR protection exist only at the country level and do not identify interindustry variation in the ability to extract rents through exclusive rights and other factors. The authors introduce this dimension and compute a parameter that reflects the relative length of time that positive profits may be earned in various industries. Estimation results find that strengthening IPR would reduce exporting in all industries in the sample. However, it would raise (reduce) foreign direct investment, relative to licensing, in industries with shorter (longer) rent-extraction times.

Impact of Universal Health Care Coverage on patient demand for health care services in Thailand

Fully implemented in Thailand in 2002, the Universal Health Care Coverage (UC) Program aimed to provide cheap access to health care services, for 30 baht (less than 1 U.S. dollar) per visit, to all uninsured Thais. In this paper, we studied the impact of the UC in Thailand on the demand for health care services using hospital level data. We found that the UC program was successful in increasing outpatient demand for health care, particularly the demand from the elderly and the poor. However, outpatient demand for health care dramatically increased during the first year of the program and faded away quickly in subsequent years. In contrast to outpatient demand, the number of inpatient visits and the number of days for which the inpatients were admitted at hospitals declined after the UC program was launched. In this paper, we offer our explanation of these phenomena, highlight problems associated with the UC program, and provide policy recommendations to improve the program.

Revisiting McCallum's Border Puzzle

The “border effect” in international trade refers to a situation in which there is higher volume of trade within a country compared with the volume of trade across the countrys borders. Although trade economists are not surprised at the existence of a border effect, they do find the significant size of the estimated effect in the empirical literature perplexing. In this study we authors show why previous empirical studies have had an upwards bias in the estimation of the border effect. The study also provides more reasonable estimates of McCallums estimated border effect in United States—Canada trade.

Has the Byrd Amendment Affected US Imports

The Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act (CDSOA), also known as the Byrd Amendment, allows the US government to distribute revenues from antidumping duties to domestic firms alleging harm. Prior to the amendment these revenues were not distributed to firms. In this article, we formally test the hypothesis that the Byrd Amendment effectively provides double protection to US firms to the extent that it further restricts US imports, as argued by the EU and 11 other US trading partners. Using a rich panel of 362 US manufacturing industries for the period 1998 to 2003, we find that whether or not the Byrd Amendment restricted US imports depends crucially on the level of competitiveness in the import-competing industry. Specifically, we find that the Byrd Amendment served to restrict imports only in industries where competition is relatively weak, while the amendment is associated with an increase in imports in more competitive industries.

Remittances and immigration enforcement

Recent increases in U.S. immigration enforcement at the local and state level may be impacting remittance flows to developing countries by curtailing undocumented immigration, restricting the cyclicality of migration flows and limiting employment opportunities for the undocumented. We examine how the remitting patterns of Mexican migrants in the United States are being impacted by two types of immigration enforcement policies: police-based initiatives, such as 287(g) agreements and Secure Communities, and employment-based programs, as is the case with employment verification mandates. We find that increased enforcement reduces the share of migrants sending money home. However, legal migrants remitting money home increase their money outflows enough to offset any reductions in remittance payments from their undocumented counterparts. As a result, the average dollar amount remitted per Mexican migrant rises in the midst of increased uncertainty, safeguarding remittances as one of the least volatile sources of income in the developing world.