UC San Diego

The dissertation is comprised of three chapters, each a free-standing paper. The first chapter estimates the inflow of undocumented migrants to the United States. I find that the estimates are consistent with the previous estimates in the literature and the methodology provides a longer time series of undocumented migrants inflows than currently exists in the literature. The inflows of undocumented migrants are correlated with the business cycle in both the United States and Mexico. The second chapter models the decision to migrate over different costs structures and finds that both the lower- and upper- income shifted inward as a result of the increased smuggling fees over the previous 15 years. The model is estimated in low-cost and high-cost periods of migration to determine whether the decision to migrant has changed for different income groups. The third chapter estimates the market-perceived monetary policy rule by using macroeconomic announcements to forecast changes in market expectations. We find evidence that between 1994 and 2007 the market-perceived Federal Reserve policy rule changed: the inflation response became more hawkish, and the output response vanished