Workers' remittances declined sharply as the COVID‐19 pandemic spread in the first half of 2020, rebounding in the second half. This paper analyses the impact of containment and economic support measures on remittances sent to Latin America during 2019–2020 using a gravity model estimated with the Poisson pseudo‐maximum likelihood estimator (PPML). Results show that containment measures in receiving countries mainly explain the fall in remittance flows, whereas the effect of economic support measures is not robust. Among the traditional explanatory factors, the business cycle and the real exchange rate in receiving countries explain the subsequent recovery of remittances.

In recent years, Costa Rica has experienced greater international migration from neighboring countries due to political, economic, and social reasons, raising discussions on the impact of migration on wages of native Costa Rican workers. This article is the first that disentangles the impact of migration on wages for native Costa Ricans from the impact for settled immigrants by analyzing the effect within groups of education, experience, and regions and controlling for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that on average, there is a significant negative effect of recent immigration on the wages of established immigrants, but no significant effect on the wages of natives over the period from 2012 to 2019. The outcomes hold when using different units of analysis and identification strategies.

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