Research Partnerships Announced for 2019

The SMU Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center is excited to announce three new research partnerships for 2019! We look forward to working with the Migration Policy Institute, SMU Simmons School of Education, and the Bush School of Government to uncover groundbreaking findings in areas spanning across migration, education & trade.

Migration Policy Institute

The New High Skilled Mexican Immigrants in Texas

This joint publication will feature new data about how many recent Mexican immigrants in the largest Texas cities are high skilled and how their income level is contributing to the local economies. The findings would be featured in events in both Dallas and Washington D.C. and would continue the Center’s working relationship with one of the best research institutions in migration.

SMU Simmons School of Education

Texas Implementation of Excess Semester Credit Hours

Dr. Dominique Baker proposes to generate key findings about how the state implements “Excess Semester Credit Hours (ESCH).” The publications and policy recommendations from this project would aid in crafting better policies to encourage the on-time college completion of students, particularly those students underrepresented in higher education. This could be one way that Texas would be able to increase educational attainment and the development of human capital. The deliverables include presentations in Education conferences in Texas.

Bush School of Government, Texas A&M

Long and Short Term Effects of USMCA

Dr. Raymond Robertson will research how significant the changes to the U.S.-Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) will be in terms of trade and investment. The goal is to focus on the trade and production linkages between Texas and Mexico and analyze how the specific changes in the NAFTA-USMCA will affect these relationships. It will be one of the first studies that analyzes these effects specifically for Texas and Mexico.

China and Latin America: China’s regional impact on U.S. and Texas-Mexico relations

This research paper will generate economic data about how China’s growing presence in Latin America does have an effect on both U.S-Mexico and Texas-Mexico relations. This would be one of the first papers focusing on China’s impact on the Texas-Mexico economic relationship.

The effects of the labor clauses in the USMCA and the effect on workers in Texas and Mexico

This project will analyze the new labor clauses in USCMA and will generate a new gravity model that estimates the trade effects of labor provisions generally.