More or less done

So my MA paper is done and turned in, and I am back in T-town.

For those who were interested, here is a brief summary of the paper:
Emigrants that are intermediately or positively selected create a drain on the economy due to the absence of moderately to highly skilled labor. Real wage gains for those who remain behind tend not to make up for this loss. Remittances, while inducing quite a bit of development in investment by small businesses and educational development, are found to not make up for the GDP loss in the case of Mexico. However the loss is found to be insignificant. In certain Caribbean countries, remittances more than make up for the loss in workers. There is no literature on if remittances in Caribbean countries are used for investment in small business and education as they are in Mexico and El Salvador.
Legal and illegal emigrants are not differentiated.
Familial Networks are found to play a key role in emigration, but are largely ignored in the literature (to the detriment of the literature).
The models could be generalized for studying other cases (Africa/EU, West/East Europe, etc.)

Nothing big. Just a review of what economists have done with the effects of emigration since Borjas in 1987 (not much). That is the sum of it. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I can provide any papers (Mishra, Borjas, Cox) that I think are a good read if you're interested. I can provide interpretation for the unreadable (seriously, some of these took me days to translate... and they were in English...) papers with interesting results (Hanson, Woodruff and Zenteno, Borjas). Side note: Mexico is a good place for sexy data. Or at least so say the professors...

Speaking of emigration, I've got all application materials in for grad schools with the exceptions of my transcripts for this semester. Who knows where I'll be next year? Colorado, Texas, Maryland, Washington, New Mexico, Kansas, Arizona, Massachusetts, or Oklahoma. Place your bets now. You can rank them in order of top three most probable. Closest one gets a prize. Results in May (hopefully).

Happy holidays (this blog is losing the war on Christmas).