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This thesis examines the macroeconomic impact of remittances in developing economies, using data from 1990 to 2016. Despite poverty-reducing and welfare-enhancing characteristics for recipient households, remittances remain to inhibit macroeconomic policy in developing economies; by producing Dutch Disease effects, by creating an indeterminate effect on long run economic growth, and by reducing the quality of financial institutions. This thesis explores these key issues surrounding remittances along with a overall theme on fiscal policy, financial development and monetary policy. The significant contributions of my thesis are as follows: it provides insight into the effects of remittance inflows on fiscal cyclicality in developing economies; it provides new understanding into the relationship between remittances, financial development and economic growth; it provides a newly constructed measure of the financial development index across the panel dataset; and it shows the effects of remittance inflows on monetary policy by incorporating dynamics. The use of different empirical techniques enables the thesis to investigate the effects of remittances on key macroeconomic aggregates across several different continents. It first uses empirical techniques to examine how remittances affect fiscal policy over the business cycle. The empirical analysis consists of developing countries that are split up into six datasets: Africa, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Asia, Latin America, Europe and the full dataset which combines the countries from all regions into one dataset. The thesis examines the potential for remittance inflows to influence fiscal policy over the fiscal cycle. The empirical evidence confirms that remittance inflows have a direct impact on the fiscal cycle. Moreover, the full dataset confirms that remittance inflows contribute for fiscal policy to be procyclical over the fiscal cycle. The Remittances-Output gap interaction term shows a positive coefficient which could be explained by the negative impact of remittances on labour supply. Similar to previous literature, Justino and Shemyakina (2012) find that the amount of remittances received by a household has an overall negative impact on labour force participation. The main finding here is that Asia, MENA, Europe and the Latin America regions corroborate the full dataset results but the effect of remittance inflows on the cyclicality of fiscal policy is countercyclical for Africa. This thesis further investigates how the level of financial development can influence the relationship between remittances and economic growth. By incorporating how remittances can influence the financial sector with the use of cross-country panel data analysis this thesis aims to bridge the gap in the existing literature in remittances and financial development. Moreover, the creation of the financial development index is intended to capture financial sector development by bringing together several existing measures of financial development. The outcomes for the full sample indicate that there is a positive impact of remittances on economic growth with those countries that are less financially developed. The results in this regard differ for the regional datasets. Does monetary policy in developing countries influence remittance inflows? This is what Chapter five explores. It investigates how developing countries can effectively understand how monetary policy responds to remittances in the short and long run. The chapter provides analysis into the dynamics of remittances and monetary policy, whilst controlling for country specific effects. The use of impulse response analysis enables the study to capture the impact of shocks from each system variable. This chapter finds a complex web of relationships between remittances, monetary policy and economic growth. The results indicate that a depreciation in the domestic currency causes an increase in the level of remittances for the full dataset and for the other regional datasets with the exception of MENA.

This thesis explores three important factors that have been central to the pursuit of economic development in developing countries, particularly those in Africa. These are capital flows, economic integration and financial crises. Chapter 1 examines the causes and consequences of capital flight in African countries. Building on standard portfolio choice model, the study links the phenomenon of capital flight to the domestic investment climate (broadly defined) and shows that African agents move their portfolios abroad as a result of a deteriorating domestic investment climate where the risk-adjusted rate of return is unfavourable. The results presented suggest that economic risk, policy distortions and the poor profitability of African investments explain the variation in capital flight. In addition, employing a PVAR and its corresponding impulse responses, the chapter shows that capital flight shocks worsen economic performance. Chapter 2 explores the (independent) effects of crises and openness on a large sample of African countries using dynamic panel techniques. Focusing on sudden stops, currency, twin and sovereign debt crises, the chapter shows that economic crises are associated with growth collapses in Africa. In contrast, economic openness is found to be beneficial to growth. More importantly, we find that, consistent with standard Mundell-Flemming type models and sticky-price open economy models, greater openness to trade and financial flows mitigates the adverse effects of crises. In the final chapter, we examine whether capital flows such as FDI, foreign aid and migrant remittances crowd-in or crowd-out domestic investment in developing countries. Applying recently developed panel cointegration techniques which can handle cross-sectional heterogeneity, serial correlation and endogeneity, we find that FDI and remittances have a positive and significant effect on domestic investment in the long-run while aid tends to act as a substitute for investment. We also conduct panel Granger causality analysis and find that the effect of FDI on investment is both transitory as well as permanent. That is, it tends to crowd-in domestic investment both in the short-run and in the long-run. We do not find any causal links between foreign aid and investment. The results show that, while remittances do not have causal effects on investment in the short-run, there is a bidirectional (causal) relationship between the two in the long-run.

This thesis will examine the adoption, usage and outcomes of a mobile money service called MPESA. Since being launched in 2007, the service has seen phenomenal growth in Kenya. Over 7.5 million users, or 34% of the adult population, have registered with M-PESA. Such growth is impressive as it has surpassed other ICTs in the country. This includes the mobile phone, which has been hailed as the fastest growing ICT in Africa. It has also surpassed the growth of mobile money in the North, where many services have been discontinued because they failed to attract a sufficient number of customers. M-PESA thus provides an interesting case of an ICT growing rapidly in the South, and “failing” in the North. In this context, the first part of the thesis examines why such rapid growth occurred. This analysis is presented from two perspectives. First, the socio-technical systems framework is used to present M-PESA as a complex system rather than an isolated application. This perspective makes clear that M-PESA grew rapidly because it had a dedicated team of system builders. These individuals took numerous strategies to enroll the elements and maintain the stability of the entire system. They further worked to engineer the social, economic, legal and political environments of the technology. Growth is also explained from the perspective of the user. The thesis makes clear that M-PESA was widely adopted because it fit into existing social practices and systems of logic. In other words, it helped users to do what they were doing before the technology was introduced. This includes money transfers back home. It also includes savings. The thesis further reveals that financial practices began to change as M-PESA became integrated into daily life. For example, users began to send money home more often. They also increased the number of their savings transactions. Such changing practices engendered a variety of consequences to daily life. This includes rising household incomes in the rural areas. It also includes new struggles over limited resources. The impacts, or wider-scale implications of usage, are also discussed. The analysis shows that a whole industry for mobile money developed as a result of M-PESA’s success. The thesis makes a contribution to knowledge in several ways. It presents a case of domestication in the South and highlights the unique factors that shape this process, from wide-scale political violence to structures of debt and obligation. It further makes the relationship between technologies and impact more clear. It shows that the technology itself does not engender the outcomes. It does, however, have a role in shaping the practices that do.

This thesis presents a sub-national comparative analysis of the nexus between migration and development using the case of two disparate migrant communities (from the Upper East and Eastern regions of Ghana) in the UK. The aim is to examine how inherent socio-economic inequalities prior to emigration impact on emigrants’ migration patterns, experiences, transnational activities and, ultimately, development outcomes at the micro and meso levels in the sending country. I argue, in this thesis, that the focus by development economists and most migration researchers on national-level macro analysis, as well as ‘location specific’ or single-site sub-national analysis, of the centrality of remittances to the enhancement of development at ‘home’ masks important nuances that are revealed by a comparative sub-national analysis. This study uses a case study approach, whereby two migrant communities are investigated in detail within their pre-migration contexts. This allows for a deeper understanding of how transnational migration practices and/or processes are influenced by, and influence their context. It examines regional socio-economic inequalities and the interconnections between migration stage, spatial scales and local development. This is achieved through a fifteen-month fieldwork using multiple research methods (key-informant interviews, in-depth structured and semi-structured interviews, surveys, participant observation and library research) in order to corroborate and triangulate findings from different sources. The thesis takes a spatiotemporal perspective in the migration-development nexus debate. Respondents for this research include economic migrants and refugees/forced migrants. Among others, I conclude that globalisation and access to effective, yet relatively cheap, technological and communications facilities have bolstered individualistic migratory decision making thus reducing the centrality of the family or household as the unit of analysis in the causes and consequences of migration discourses. Overall, the thesis aims to contribute a new, broader, and more inclusive perspective to migration research by arguing that migration-development phenomena are better appreciated through a comprehensive approach that encompasses migrants and sending communities and underlines the relationship between the two within a sub-national context.

In spite of the prevalence of rural-urban interactions in developing countries, much remains to be learnt about their welfare impacts. This thesis extends the discussion on rural-urban linkages by examining – for Ghana – two of the main forms of such interactions: migration and remittance flows. The study explores factors influencing migration and remittance flows, and also evaluates the impacts of these linkages on poverty and consumption welfare, using data from the 1998/99 Ghana Living Standards Survey. A key feature of the analyses is the construction of counterfactual scenarios and the application of a methodology that adjusts for selectivity bias.

After discussing the Malawian context and summarising the remittance research, I focus on remittances in rural Malawi. I follow remittances from the giver’s motivations through to the receiver’s view of remittances and how the receiver uses them and finally to their impact as a means of moderating the effect of negative shocks on the receiving household. Results show that parents remit to respondents for altruistic purposes, or for insurance motivations (e.g. to help out the respondent if they are sick). Respondents remit to parents for altruistic motivations and inheritance. There is strong bi-directionality in the remittance flows. Children remit to respondents as an “insurance premium”, and for inheritance motivations. Altruism motivates respondents to give to their children. There is strong evidence of co-insurance between respondents and their siblings with both insurance payouts and premiums being paid. Respondents and their siblings also remit to each other for altruistic motivations. There is strong evidence of “mental accounting” amongst both male and female headed households. Remittances exhibit a much lower MPC than salary and farming income. Male and female headed households differ in their use of income from different sources, however one result is consistent: remittances are used for education. Probit models indicate that households are more likely to receive remittances from local areas if someone in the household is sick (local remittances insure a health shock). Households that suffer from drought are more likely to receive remittances from more distant areas (other districts, a city, abroad). Drought has a major negative impact on consumption levels but distant remittances insure affected households who suffer from these. Local remittances, which make up most remittance flows, are unable to insure these community shocks. Only around 10 per cent of households receive remittances from outside their home district however. Remittances help to insure household consumption against health shocks, but only food consumption is insured.

This dissertation project analyzes the ways that migration and remittances, the money that migrants send to people in their place of origin, intersect with the political and social dynamics in an Indigenous community in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region of Oaxaca, Mexico. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, which included semi-structured interviews and participant observation alongside historical archival investigation, this dissertation examines the following questions: What international organizations, national government, and private sector policies govern remittances? How does Indigenous collective work and communal governance shape remittance management? How do the responsibilities of family members shift with migration and how do remittances factor into the responsibilities that women have in migrant sending communities? In answering these questions, I approach remittances as a lens for analyzing global migration and related flows of capital in everyday life and examine how labor migration and remittances intertwine with the collective work and communal governance that shape Indigenous life in Oaxaca. Through the examination of these practices, I found that the territory of the community expands and gendered norms shift. The three empirical chapters examine essentializing claims in remittance policy literature alongside the reality of how women manage remittances, how labor done elsewhere is extracted in remittance form and used to support social reproduction in the community, and the colonial foundations of my fieldwork. My feminist theoretical contribution argues against labeling women as disempowered and passive receivers of remittances while questioning the neat distinctions between productive and reproductive labor, thereby calling for a more thorough understanding of the diversity of economic lives. In this dissertation, I incorporate and make contributions to feminist economic geography, feminist theories of social reproduction, critical development and finance studies, interdisciplinary Latin American feminist work on the economy and gender, and post/de-colonial theories.

Foreign aid and remittances are the two major sources of external development finance for many developing countries. Levels of foreign aid received have improved gradually over the last few decades, while remittances have increased phenomenally in the developing world—especially over the last two decades. There is, therefore, a great amount of interest from researchers in the effectiveness of remittances and foreign aid in promoting macroeconomic stabilisation, growth and development. Apart from the important roles played by these financial flows, the question arises as to whether these two flows—foreign aid and remittances—are interlinked. Very little is known about the relationship between foreign aid and remittances because only a limited number of studies have analysed their relationship, and these do not provide an insight into how they are related. Furthermore, despite improved economic growth, developing countries have, in recent years, faced structural changes and rapid urbanisation. This thesis analyses these issues empirically by employing recent developments in econometric methods, using data for the period 1980–2016 from 50 aid-dependent developing countries. It also conducts an in-depth analysis of these issues through a specific case study that uses data for that same period from four South Asian countries. The thesis firstly conducts a review of literature to identify a number of factors which influence remittance flows in developing countries. One of the findings reveals that foreign aid is a significant factor in determining remittances and has a negative effect, indicating that the two financial flows can be substituted for one another. The thesis then examines the functional form of the relationship between remittances and foreign aid and the different transmission channels or mechanisms through which they are interconnected. In contrast to more traditional literature, this thesis identified a non-linear relationship between remittances and foreign aid to the South Asian countries—a U-shaped relationship. Its findings also suggest that an increase in foreign aid reduces remittances to countries with lower aid-dependency while increasing remittances to countries with higher aid-dependency. Using a dynamic model for the South Asian countries, the thesis finds that, in the short-run, foreign aid helps increase remittances while, in the long-run, it reduces remittances. An analysis of the transmission channels reveals that increasing foreign aid improves human capital, which then positively influences remittances. Moreover, the effect of foreign aid on remittances through the economic growth channel is significant and robust in developing countries. Importantly, due to the potential impact of human capital on economic growth, the thesis also examines the human capital-led growth channel of foreign aid. Its findings indicate that the human capital-led growth channel of foreign aid has a significant and positive impact on remittances in developing countries. Secondly, the thesis examines the impact of all external financial flows (including foreign direct investment—FDI) on the well-being of the relevant economies. It contributes to the literature by analysing various channels of financial flows by considering the effect of other variables—such as political stability (democracy), trade openness and human capital—on different measures of well-being. In developing countries, its findings indicate a significant and positive effect of all three external financial flows—foreign aid, remittances and FDI—on economic growth; the impact of FDI is relatively greater than the other two. Considering only the South Asian countries, foreign aid has had a significantly negative impact on economic growth, while FDI and remittances have a significantly positive impact. Besides economic growth, the thesis also examines the impact of financial flows on income inequality, which is a better measure of well-being. In developing countries, foreign aid and remittances both significantly reduce income inequality. The results for the South Asia countries show that foreign aid directly reduces income inequality while remittances do not have a directly significant effect on it. However, remittances are effective in reducing income inequality through their impact on the human capital development channel, providing better livelihood opportunities to skilled people. The thesis thirdly investigates the relationship between structural transformation, urbanisation and remittances. The short-run dynamic analysis reveals that structural transformation and urbanization Granger cause remittances in the South Asian countries. However, when considering all developing countries, only structural transformation has Granger-causation on remittances. Furthermore, the empirical findings indicate a two-way (bi-directional) causal relationship between urbanization and structural transformation as well as between remittances and structural transformation. In summary, the findings of the thesis indicate a negative relationship between remittances and foreign aid, and that the two flows are interconnected through various channels (human capital, economic growth, migration). In addition, the results also suggest that external financial flows improve economic growth and reduce income inequality in developing countries. Moreover, its findings indicate a short-run dynamic relationship between structural transformation, urbanisation and remittances. Most significantly, this thesis offers important findings that are beneficial for policymakers in developing countries, donor countries and international financial institutions. The findings suggest that policymakers should focus more on human capital development which can be effective in increasing remittance flows, thus increasing their impact on economic growth and reducing income inequality.

This dissertation analyzes key challenges to maximizing the impact of development policies. It focuses on three sectors - migration, taxation, and education. Each of these sectors offers massive development potential but is constrained by some combination of information asymmetry, policy barriers, and limited resources. I study these challenges in a global context with projects in the UAE, Philippines, Pakistan, and the US. I use several context and question-specific research designs: conducting randomized controlled trials, analyzing natural experiments, and evaluating policy interventions. I combine survey and administrative data, with novel identification strategies and statistical techniques to estimate causal effects. The first chapter studies spousal communication among transnational households - households where one spouse temporarily migrates for work. Despite regular communication between spouses, information asymmetry persists in these households. I analyze if this information asymmetry is caused by spouses strategically misreporting information to influence resource allocation in the household. Misreporting, by definition, involves purposefully falsifying information, making it challenging to identify. I address this challenge using a novel field experiment among Filipino migrants in the UAE and their spouses staying behind in the Philippines. I find that both migrants and their spouses staying behind have biased beliefs about each other's finances and these biases are the result of strategic misreporting. Spouses staying behind and some subgroups of migrants underreport their income to influence the remittance decision in their favor. The results show that addressing information asymmetry requires interventions that increase the ability of spouses to verify and monitor each other's reported information. However, the welfare impacts of such interventions are a priori ambiguous because better information sharing may reduce remittances. The second chapter, co-authored with Joel Slemrod and Mazhar Waseem, evaluates two Pakistani programs to study the impact of public disclosure and social recognition of tax payments on tax compliance. Pakistan began revealing the income tax paid by every taxpayer in the country from 2012. Simultaneously, another program began recognizing and rewarding the top 100 tax-paying corporations, partnerships, self-employed individuals, and wage-earners. We combine publicly disclosed and restricted administrative tax return data for the universe of tax filers to create an extended panel of tax records from 2006 to 2015. Using empirical strategies based on name commonness for the public disclosure program and cutoffs in the social recognition program's eligibility criteria, we show that both programs induced strong compliance responses. Our results suggest that such programs can be important policy levers to mobilize resources, especially in weak-enforcement-capacity economies. The third chapter studies the joint educational attainment and migration decisions of international students choosing to study in the US. Immigration critics argue that international students are primarily come to the US for employment and use their student status to bypass restrictions on employment-based migration. I use exchange rate variations to analyze these competing educational and employment incentives for potential international students. A depreciation of the home currency reduces educational incentives by increasing the relative cost of US education but increases employment incentives by making US income relatively more valuable. I find that the cost of education effect dominates the higher relative income effect. A depreciation of the home currency reduces the stock and flow of international students from that country.

This dissertation broadens the theoretical focus of transnationalism and remittances to include that of the second generation via brokered social ties. In particular, I focus in expanding the theoretical scope of the New Economics of Labor Migration by discussing how migrants actively facilitate the second generation within transnational household financial decisions with nonmigrants in the ancestral home country. In so doing, this dissertation outlines the ways in which second generation cross-border ties are uniquely constructed and sustained in a manner that is different from that of first generation connections, both logistically and relationally. Throughout the first of half of the dissertation, the case of second generation Mexican and Filipino Americans remittances are used to illustrate the ways in which brokerage is centrally required to mediate both cross-border connections and financial remittances generally. By examining second generation Mexican- and Filipino-Americans, two groups that differ in linguistic proficiency, geographical proximity to the home country, and interpersonal contact with nonmigrants, this dissertation highlights the common role of a broker for both groups. Building on this theoretical expansion, this study illustrates the importance of social and familial relationships on a generalizable level by testing hypotheses derived from transnational scholarship to prove that the decision to remit among the second generation is shaped on a household-level, both financially and socially with household decisions manifesting uniquely within particular remittance corridors. Finally, this dissertation concludes by examining the differential effects that factors have on first and second generation remittance practices. In so doing, this final section demonstrates how the first and second generation fulfill different financial roles within a remitting relationship. In addition, effects are not uniform in how they affect the differences in the likelihood of remitting and the average amount of money sent in each transfer across generations. As the second generation are much more rooted in their country of birth, aspects of social connections with those in the ancestral home country shape the likelihood of remitting and the average amount of money sent in each transfer in a different manner compared to the first generation.

This dissertation presents a collection of essays that study ways in which human mobility affects economic development in origin countries. It focuses on Latin America—a region historically connected to episodes of large-scale migration, recipient of significant remittance flows, and victim of sluggish economic growth. The first two chapters examine the effects of return migration from the United States on aggregate economic welfare and non-state violence in communities of origin in Mexico. The analysis is motivated by the historic reversal in the Mexico-U.S. migration flows in the early 2000s. The third chapter analyzes the interaction between remittances, migration, and secondary school enrollment. The first chapter explores the impact of return migration on the economic development of communities of origin using data from Mexico. The analysis exploits the exogenous variation in return migration rates due to exposure to immigration enforcement in the United States and geographical distance to the border. Using a novel dataset compiled with information from both sides of the border and spanning over a decade, the study finds that increased rates of return migration leads to higher levels of development via improved labor, wealth, and education outcomes. The empirical results suggest that the benefits of migration may extend beyond individuals' tenure in host countries, as savings, human capital, entrepreneurial initiative, and social norms acquired abroad have the potential to contribute to economic development back home. Chapter two examines the relationship between return migration and non-state violence. Existing literature shows that immigration to the United States reduces crime through urban renewal, social cohesion, and the revitalization of marginalized communities. Existing evidence showing that immigrants pacify communities in the United States and that migrants benefit from their experiences abroad suggests that migrants should benefit their hometowns in similar ways. This chapter advances this argument by analyzing homicides data for 2011-2013—the most violent period of Mexico's Drug War—and finding that higher rates of return migration lead to a decline in local homicide rates. In addition, using a censored quantile instrumental variable model, the analysis shows that municipalities in the bottom quartile of the homicide rate distribution are the ones that benefit the most. The results suggest that promoting migrants' reintegration and inclusion has important policy implications in terms of governments’ efforts to reduce crime. Chapter three uses the entire Ecuadorian census to analyze how migration affects enrollment in secondary education among Ecuadorian children. The hypothesis is that remittances encourage human capital formation by relaxing household budget constraints, and that parental migration discourages investments in education as children enter the labor force at a younger age. A utility-maximizing representative household model accounts for changes in budget constraints, as a consequence of remittance reception, and changes in education decisions, as a result of migration. The empirical estimates find evidence of a positive income effect from remittances but a detrimental effect from parental migration. The analysis also finds heterogeneous results when disaggregating the population by gender, household wealth, rural vs. urban, and family migration status. The study argues that the targeted investment of remittances in human capital formation may contribute to the empowerment of marginalized populations and disrupt the inter-generational transmission of poverty.

Remittances, the money that immigrants send back to recipients in their country of origin, are one of the most prominent types of transnational economic ties and provide many migrants with continued interaction with family and friends who remain in their origin countries. These transactions may prove to be beneficial or detrimental to migrant mental and physical health. Using the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), I assess whether remittance-sending has countervailing associations with migrant mental and physical health. I hypothesize that remittance-sending puts migrants at a physical health disadvantage by depleting already lower incomes. I also hypothesize that remitting migrants experience a mental health bonus through fulfillment of family roles. Overall, I find that remittances are associated with a physical health disadvantage and only provide a mental health bonus under certain circumstances. I also find that the composition of migrants who select into remitting is consequential for health outcomes. And for both physical and mental health, the type of remittance transfer (to extended or nuclear family) and the magnitude of the transfer conditions the overall health impact, particularly for mental health. My findings underscore the complexity of transnational ties, in terms of who selects into transnational economic behavior (i.e. remittance sending), the type of behavior (magnitude and type of remittance transfer), and the health consequences, both physical and mental, of that behavior.

Between the socialist regime during the 1980s and the present-day post-socialist period, Cambodia has undergone a series of remarkable changes. The country’s economic system has transitioned from an agricultural-oriented economy to a more manufacturing-oriented economy. The industrial sector has become a major provider of employment and income to young Cambodians. As a result, the country’s labor mobility has increased significantly from an almost stagnant to a robust state. With the rapid industrialization and increasing migration from rural areas to urban areas or overseas, the Cambodian government and workers encounter a myriad of challenges and opportunities in the post-socialist period. This thesis explores the transformation of the Cambodian labor mobility from the socialist to the post-socialist period as well as the influences of industrialization on those rural migrants who now live and work in the country’s Special Economic Zones. This thesis explores three research questions: (1) How has the recent transition to a capitalist market economy affected migration patterns in Cambodia? (2) What factors have caused rural Cambodian residents to migrate to urban centers and abroad? and (3) What policy suggestions can be made to improve socio-economic conditions for Cambodian migrant workers? In an attempt to answer these research questions, two sample groups, totaling of 58 participants, of domestic migrant and immigrant workers engaged in face-to-face interviews. Cambodia’s economic transition has certainly created a large and growing number of manufacturing jobs for rural migrants in newly industrialized urban areas. However, this study finds that unlike conventional thinking that rural migrants are attracted to manufacturing jobs and better economic opportunities offered in cities or overseas, many migrants leave their rural homes due to low productivity in farming. The lack of infrastructure (irrigation system) and the increasing effects of climate change, which causes persistent drought and heavy flooding, negatively affect farms and decrease the agricultural yields. While failing farms have been the primary factor in motivating and keeping the domestic migration, higher wages have been the pull factor for the immigrant workers. This research finding clearly shows that the availability of manufacturing jobs influences the migrant and immigrant workers’ decision on different levels. The migration journeys of both groups of workers consist of opportunities and challenges, which require government intervention.

This dissertation uses a mixed method approach to examine the determinants of internal remittances that are connected to the social networks of urban migrant street vendors. Urban street markets are a point of entry for many migrants moving from rural areas to cities in the Global South. The qualitative portion of the dissertation uses an ethnographic approach including participant observation, interviews and focus groups to examine the social networks of street vendors in a market in the municipality of Madina, Ghana. The quantitative analysis codes data from the ethnography in order to conduct a social network analysis using quadratic assignment procedure and logistic regression quadratic assignment procedure to analyze the relationship between attributes of street vendors and remittance behavior. Findings lead to several policy recommendations for the international community, as well as locally based non-governmental organizations, microfinance organizations, national and local governments providing funding or designing interventions affecting street markets or working with individual street vendors.

“Remittance Fiction: Human Labor Export, Realism, and the Filipino Novel in English,” argues that anglophone writers became part of the worldwide dispersion of Filipinos through international educational exchange systems, and that their overseas literary production helped to reproduce the figure of the “overseas Filipino” as a subject and object of national development. Combining world-systems analysis with a rhetorically-oriented analysis of literary style, the dissertation pursues a double investigation. First, it constructs a genealogy of realism in the Philippine anglophone novel rooted in the twentieth-century evolution of the Philippines from an agricultural economy to a financialized economy built on labor export and migrant remittances. Second, it examines the conditions of this economic transformation through a formalist analysis of literary texts I call “remittance fiction,” that is, works produced out of the writer’s overseas experience and valorized at home as national literature.Each chapter seeks to establish the dialectic between realism, nationalism, and the remaking of the Filipino by the state as “human capital,” by focusing on the literary remittances of Juan C. Laya, Edilberto K. Tiempo, N. V. M. Gonzalez, Nick Joaquin, Bienvenido N. Santos, Wilfrido D. Nolledo, and Ninotchka Rosca. Chapter 1 analyzes how Laya’s His Native Soil adapted the bildungsroman to develop a realist prose style capable of capturing the contradictory requirements of US-directed free trade under the commonwealth transition to independence. Chapter 2—through an analysis of Tiempo’s literary criticism, Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels, and Gonzalez’s A Season of Grace and The Bamboo Dancers—examines the importation of New Criticism into the Philippines in the context of postwar import-substituting industrialization, a process enabled by the expatriate writer’s overseas training in creative writing through programs such as Paul Engle’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Wallace Stegner’s Stanford Creative Writing Program. Chapter 3 historicizes the increasing dominance of the historical novel after 1965 by situating Santos’s Villa Magdalena, Nolledo’s But for the Lovers, and Rosca’s State of War in relation to the decline of import-substitution and the rise of the new remittance economy under Ferdinand E. Marcos’s labor export program. Articulating the relations between literary and economic histories, the dissertation tells the story of how Filipino English writers imagined their relation to the nation, how the state itself envisioned them as nation-builders and transnational mediators, and how international cultural organizations provided the transpacific institutional matrix within which remittance fictions were produced and integrated into economic and literary world-systems defined by combined and uneven development.

Remittances, the sending of a portion of an immigrant’s income to friends and family, have become an undeniable and significant part of the global economy. This is especially true in some common immigrant sending regions where remittances make up a dominant portion of the local economy. The New Immigrant Survey has released the second wave of data in its cohort study of immigrants recently achieving Lawful Permanent Residence status in the United States. In light of this newly available information, this study seeks to highlight demographic and background characteristics of immigrants that have a statistically significant relationship on their sending of remittances. Moreover, the results from both waves of data are compared to answer the questions "what type of immigrant tends to remit more over time?" and "what type of immigrant tends to remit less over time?" Several variables emerge as significant predictors of the sending of remittances, including age, sex, income, education, region of origin, and others, and their differential effects on the sending of remittances provide new insight on the contemporary US immigrant experience. Results from this study may prove useful for policy makers looking to create targeted programs with the aim of using remittances as a tool for development, both for the immigrant community in the US and for immigrant sending regions abroad.

Remittances are identified in the literature as having a positive impact on source regions. Yet, theliterature on the developmental impacts of remittances on source regions focuses on the economicand social impacts with very limited attention paid to the geographical. The purpose of this thesisis to study the geographical impacts of remittances on source regions using Lebanese immigrantsin Cleveland, Ohio. Thirty-two structured interviews were conducted in order to acquiredemographic, remittance and migration history data. The main research question used is: What isthe geography of remittances of Lebanese migrants from Cleveland to Lebanon? Three subquestions originate from it: What is the scale and frequency of remittances sent and who are theseimmigrants? Where and to whom in Lebanon are the remittances sent? What are they intended forin different places? The questions derive from three concepts: Remittances, development andmigration.

This dissertation focusses on three topics related to human capital investments, microcredit and agriculture in East Africa. The first essay investigates how health shocks affect farm productivity in the presence of microcredit. It is expected that microcredit increases agricultural productivity by enhancing allocative and technical efficiency and by overcoming financial constraints that reduce purchase of inputs. However, microcredit will have competing uses in the event of a health shock to the household; hence, it is important to investigate changes in farm productivity due to health shocks with and without microcredit. Existing studies on the microcredit-productivity relationship do not account for the effect of uninsured health shocks to the household. A theoretical model is developed and empirically tested using data from Uganda. The problem of self-selection into microcredit is addressed by use of an endogenous switching regression model. The results reveal that uninsured health shocks lower farm productivity. However, microcredit has a significant mitigating effect on the productivity losses. Microcredit effectively serves as insurance against health shocks in rural areas where formal health insurance markets do not exist. Thus, microcredit generates a double dividend in smallholder agriculture by both improving health status of the farm population and improving agricultural productivity.The second essay explores gender disaggregated effects of microcredit on capital accumulation using a nationally representative dataset from Uganda. The study contributes to the scarce literature on long term impact of microcredit on capital asset accumulation in SSA. Using panel data, issues of selection bias and endogeneity prevalent with microcredit impact evaluations are addressed. The results show that microcredit has a positive and significant effect on physical productive assets and human capital accumulation but no effect on non-productive assets. However, when data is disaggregated by gender, microcredit has a positive and significant effect on productive assets and human capital accumulation for only male-headed households. The study concludes that microcredit increases capital accumulation of men but not of women.The third essay examines the role of remittances in livelihoods of households in developing countries. Previous studies have shown that remittances are mostly utilized for investment in estates, agricultural inputs or education. Remittances may also be useful for smoothing consumption by poor rural households. This essay estimates the differences in consumption patterns for macronutrients and micronutrients between remittance recipients and non-recipients using data from Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. An instrumental variable strategy is adopted in econometric estimations of nutrient consumption to address issues of self-selection and endogeneity of net income and remittances. Furthermore, the instrumental variable quantile regression method is used to estimate the distributional effects of remittances. A major finding is that remittances increase investment in protein and selected micronutrients, vitamin A, vitamin C and calcium; these are nutrients that are vitally important for physical development of children and for improving the health of adults. Remittances do not have a significant effect on consumption of the macronutrients, carbohydrates and fats, or total calories.

Social science discourses on migration and development emphasize migrants' altruism or self-interest as the determinants of their remitting practices, which is countered by alternative explanations focusing on social culture and structure. Due to the dichotomy of structure/agency, the current approaches offer unsatisfactory explanations of migrants' remitting practices. This dissertation aims to proposes a corrective by developing an alternative model of understanding the determinants of migrants' remitting practices. It synthesizes three strands of social science literature and derive the conception of remitting as a collective social act. From a realist approach following Durkheim, it begins at the empirical manifestations of migrants' remitting practices, but looks at deeper levels of social reality (the actual and the real) in identifying the determinants. It focuses on the internal social relations between the individuals involved in the acts in question as well as the external relations between the individuals and their social world to recognize the determinants of acts. Thus, it adopts a mixed-methods approach involving ethnographic fieldworks supplemented by small-scale survey with convenient samples. Following the theoretical case selection strategy of global ethnography, it investigates remitting practices among Bangladeshi migrants in Tokyo and Los Angeles. Holding the origin of the migrants constant allows for isolating the role of their different destinations in determining their remitting practices. This dissertation recognizes social norms in origin culture, advances in family life-cycle, legal status and social incorporation and/or marginalization in the destination as the determinants of migrants' remitting practices. While confirming the centrality of migrant family in remitting practices in the NELM perspective, it goes beyond by including how internal family relations and external social relations collectively determine migrants' remitting. It advances our knowledge of migrants' remitting by incorporating both migrants' agency and social structures embedding remitting practices. Besides generating satisfactory explanations of migrants' remitting, this study demonstrates how to combine agency and structure in migration studies in particular and sociology in general. It also offers valuable insights for development policy-making utilizing migrants' remittances in their origin communities. It concludes with a call for extending the scope of the study by extensive and systematic use of quantitative data on the general patterns of remitting and to include familiar destination countries of temporary migration in future studies.

Does the inflow of remittances affect the quality of institutions in the recipient countries? This question is important because economists have stressed that good economic institutions, particularly those in the public sector, are instrumental for economic development and growth. The literature on remittances, however, does not document a thorough analysis and compelling evidence of the relationship between these private financial transfers and institutional quality. Unlike other kinds of international capital flows, remittances inflows are not mediated by the government of recipient countries. Remittances are not taxed directly and so are not a source of revenue for the government. Then a natural question first arises, namely what mechanism explains the relationship, if any, between remittances and the quality of domestic governance? Given the substantial size and impressive growth of remittances to many developing countries, we investigate the effects of these income transfers on domestic institutions. Studies show that remittances are most likely to influence the incentives faced by households and the government. So inflows of remittances can be a potential factor to affect institutional quality through their effects on private and public investment. In this dissertation, we examine the effects of remittances on political institutions, financial inclusion, and entrepreneurial environment in the recipient countries. We use either cross-sectional or panel data depending on the particular measure of institutional quality. Although we employ both parametric and nonparametric methods, we primarily focus on recently advanced kernel regression that allows nonlinearity and heterogeneity in partial effects of remittances. The results of our empirical study provide strong evidence of a causal relationship between remittances and the quality of domestic institutions. The rise in remittances, however, is not found to have a uniform impact on institutional quality across all countries or over time.

This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter investigates how the historical development of Protestantism may contribute to explain current literacy disparities in India. Combining information about the spatial distribution of Protestant missions in India at the end of the nineteenth century with contemporary district-level data, I find a strong long-term relationship between the historical exposure to Protestant missions and current literacy. I then verify that this relationship is not driven by unobserved characteristics that may affect both current literacy outcomes as well as the missionaries' location decisions. The second chapter exploits local variations in the historical exposure to Christianity to explain current differences in individual HIV-related sexual behaviors in Africa. I find that exposure to the presence of Catholic missions at the end of the nineteenth century is associated with a decrease in current HIV infection rates. I also examine whether historical Catholic and Protestant missions have a different impact on individual sexual behaviors. I find that Catholicism, while having a small negative impact on the propensity of condom use, is positively associated with the adoption of safer forms of sexual behavior (pre-marriage sexual abstinence, delay of first sexual intercourse and marital faithfulness). Finally, in the third chapter I examine the impact of international migration and remittances on the labor supply of the family members left behind. Using data from Albania, I find that international migration has a significant impact on labor force participation. Remittances receipts from abroad determine a substitution effect away from the labor market, particularly for the female population.

Central America and Mexico are characterized by high levels of poverty. In response, labor migration has emerged as a major strategy among families through the sending of earnings (or remittances) to households back home. Large amounts of remittances are sent, with over $13 billion to Central America and more than $23 billion to Mexico in 2011. While remittances to Mexico have been studied extensively, much less is known about the factors associated with remittances to Central America. This mixed methods study examined remittance sending and use patterns of Mexican and Central American labor migrants to the United States. Data on remittance behaviors were drawn from two major surveys, the Latin American Migration Project and Mexican Migration Project. Quantitative analyses were conducted using multiple regression to examine family-level predictors for the decision to engage in labor migration, whether remittances were sent, amount of remittances sent, and the purposes for remitting. Qualitative analysis involved focus group interviews of Mexican and Central American migrants in the United States who currently remit to their families back home. These interviews helped to discern the meaning of remittances for migrants and their families. The quantitative results suggest that top purposes for remitting include food and daily maintenance, education, health, and housing. Additionally, remittance sending patterns differed by region of origin. Mexican migrants were more likely to send remittances and to remit larger amounts. Additionally, individuals from Mexico had increased odds of sending funds for housing expenditures while Central Americans had greater odds of remitting for education and consumer goods. According to respondents who participated in the qualitative study, increasing costs of food, health, and education coupled with limited employment options contribute to a reliance on labor migration in both regions. For many, remittances have emerged as an essential source of income for economic wellbeing and even survival. A key implication for social work of this study on the larger population patterns on remittances is that at the family level, migrants carry a dual responsibility to settle into a new country while also maintaining the economic wellbeing of family left behind.

This dissertation investigates three questions related to how families make decisions about the allocation of scarce household resources. In the first chapter, I implement an experiment among Salvadoran migrants and their family members in El Salvador that examines how changing the ability of participants to monitor each other and revealing migrant preferences can affect remittance decisions. Migrants make a decision about how much of a cash windfall to keep and how much to send home, and recipients decide how to allocate the spending of a remittance. Migrants remit more when their choice is observed by recipients, supporting a model of remittance sending where migrants react strategically to being monitored. Recipients make spending choices closer to the migrants’ preferences when they are revealed, suggesting that recipients’ choices may be inadvertently affected by imperfect information on migrant preferences. In the second chapter, I examine how the exogenous change in income provided by eligibility for the South African pension can affect decision making in the household. I find that eligible females are substantially more likely to be the primary decision makers for expenditures than non-eligible females. There is no corresponding effect for eligible males. Due to labor force withdrawal, male income does not increase at the age of eligibility, providing an explanation for the lack of impacts of male eligibility on decision making. The increase in female decision-making power translates into improved nutrition for girls and higher levels of durable goods ownership. The third chapter, written jointly with Diego Aycinena and Dean Yang, studies the intersection of two research areas: educational subsidies and migrant remittances. We implement an experiment offering migrants cash subsidies for education, which are channeled directly to a beneficiary student chosen by the migrant. The subsidies lead to increases in educational expenditures, higher private school attendance, and lower labor supply of youths in the households connected to migrant study participants. We find substantial crowd in of household educational investments, particularly for female students. There is no evidence of shifting of expenditures from other students in the household, and the subsidy has no substantial effect on remittances.

In Vietnam, international remittances are significant, estimated at around seven billion dollars annually or 11.5% of GDP. Yet beyond capital transfer, diasporic remittance economies are key nodes to witnessing an unfolding transformation of Vietnamese society through the extension of imaginations, identities, and ontological possibilities that accompany them. In this dissertation I examine the role of remittance gifting in mediating transnational kinship networks dispersed by exile and migration. Drawing on twenty months of fieldwork in Vietnam, France, and the United States, I argue that long distance international gift exchanges in the neoliberal political economy juxtapose the mobility of remittance financial flows against the confines of state bound bodies. In this contradiction is revealed a creative space for emergent social imaginaries that disrupt local structures and contingencies of desire and expectation. Furthermore, the particular characteristics of remittance gift monetary mediums and channels in a global economy, including transnational mobility and exchangeable value, affect the relationships, aspirations, and identities of the exchange participants. I trace a genealogy of how this phenomenon has shifted through changing remittance forms and transfer channels, from material and black market forms to formal bank and money service transfers. Significant transformations in the social and institutional relations among givers, receivers, and remittance facilitators accompany each of these shifts, illustrating that the socio-cultural work of remittances extends far beyond the economic realm they are usually consigned to. Remittance economies link participants to alternative social terrains through the intimacies of exchange. They impact recipients through the transfer of capital, but also via the interactions of familiar bodies and unfamiliar subjectivities. The imaginaries emerging from remittance exchange offer insight into not only the already widely examined processes of collective diaspora identity formation, but also the identities of those who never left, yet whose spatial and social identities and aspirations are inevitably expanded, challenged, and emplaced by their contingency on and imagined identification with the diasporic Other. The classic question of the gift's social role in anthropology is thus revisited in a globalized world in which the gift's long distance mobility transforms its representations and significance among the networks that exchange and encounter it.

This thesis consists of three essays covering some of the most important aspects of migration and entrepreneurship in Vietnam, as well as in low- and middle-income countries by using some unique datasets and empirical methods. The three essays have uncovered some key factors that determine the propensity of entrepreurship in Vietnam and in low- and middle- income countries, and the key determinants of labor market outcomes of internal migrants in Vietnam. Chapter 2 investigates the effect of Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) and the regulatory variables on indigenous entrepreneurship in a sample of low-and middle-income countries. Using a cross-countries micro dataset from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), and a set of country level regulatory variables and the presence of MNEs. This study finds that MNEs reduce the propensity of entrepreneurial activities, and a more enabling business environment encourages the development of entrepreneurship. Chapter 3 examines the labor market outcomes of internal migrants in Vietnam with respect to the probability of finding jobs and earnings. This study emphasizes the role of social networks on job market outcomes, which is a largely neglected aspect of the labor market in developing countries. The results show that social networks play a positive and significant effect on the probability of finding jobs and earnings among migrants. Chapter 4 studies the effect of domestic and overseas remittances on the propensity to start a household business and the role of remittances on the growth of household businesses in Vietnam. This is a particularly important study to understand how varying sources of remittances drive the development of entrepreneurship an underlying factor for long-run economic development in Vietnam and in developing countries alike. The findings show that while domestic remittances play a positive and significant role in boosting the propensity to start a household business and in the growth of the existing household businesses, overseas remittances do not have any impact on business start up or business growth.

Remittances significantly affect recipient households’ behavior. Using data from the Jamaican Survey of Living Conditions and the Jamaican Labor Force Survey ( 2001-2007), this dissertation explores the effects of remittances on labor market participation and household expenditures. Jamaica’s proximity to the United States and its diaspora of educated individuals shapes an economy largely dependent on remittances, thus providing an interesting case study. First, we investigate whether remittances alter labor market behavior of married women in remittance-receiving households located in Jamaica. Remittances, the wife’s education, and wages are all treated as endogenous when estimating labor market participation and hours worked. Unlike other studies, we find that after instrumenting for remittances, the outside income has no significant effect on the supply of labor. Second, we assess the extent that remittances alter the consumption pattern of recipient households in Jamaica. Classical theory predicts that total income affects household consumption decisions, but developments in behavioral economics suggest otherwise. The disaggregation of income streams and consumption expenditures provide us with unique insight into household behavior and in particular, spending on items such as food, schooling, and vices. Using Engel curve estimation and the two-part fractional response models, we find that the source of income significantly affects the shares of income spent in specific consumption categories. Recipients, for example, generally spend more of their income on schooling and home production and less at the grocery store. These findings suggest important implications should government look to tax or restrict the flow of remittances.

This community-based participatory study examines how campesinos (small rural landholders) understand and act upon their understandings regarding their food pattern change in the context of a transnational family life and fiscal remittances. It examines food pattern negotiation using in-depth interviews, focus groups, filmic ethnography, participant observation and Food Pattern Analysis with rural small landholders from two communities in northern Guanajuato, México. Rural food pattern shift between pre-migration and current times are explained according to the broader economic frame of rural livelihoods, the local social context, as well as through the particularities of individual's consumption. As of the 1980's newer fluid income-based livelihoods including remittances, formal employment and cash transfers coincide with campesino's increasing access to and interaction with the commercial food system. In terms of change particularities between pre-migration and current times, it is evidenced by consumption frequency changes of key foods, the manner in which dishes are served and eaten, the freshness of the staple ingredient/s used, and the resulting food pattern diversity. Food shifts are shown to ebb and flow through time and are not linear and rigid. In regard to the question of how campesinos negotiate their food patterns in rural spaces, campesino's explanations of their consumption commonly refer to three motivating factors; these include taste preference, social returns motivation, and newer notions of time and convenience. These mechanisms taken together inform the notion that fluid income through remittances, implies not only benefits among the rural sector but costs as well. For example, while remittances enhance women's and children's agency related to their food activities and negotiation of social relations, they also support enhanced access to commercial foods, and often to highly processed foods that are high in sugar, salt and fat; they also reduce rural family production capacity as a result from displaced labor. Taken together, remittances may imply an exposed risk to nutrition-related disease and potential food insecurity. Furthermore, remittances are known to foster a sense to attain an elevated standard of living which supports an "need" to consume status foods, while also encouraging the avoidance of stigmatized regional foods. However, there is no evidence to suggest that campesinos intend to permanently sever their food production capacity; a majority of respondents still produce food.

The magnitude of the flow of remittances to Bangladesh and their rate of growth has become a significant factor in the country's economy. The huge flow of remittances affects the production sector and employment structure, as well as the scale of external trade competitiveness of the economy as measured by the Real Exchange Rate (RER). Movement of the RER from its equilibrium position is very important and is also crucial in identifying the factors most influencing this movement. Using Johansen cointegration and Vector Error Correction models, this study has found that the flow of remittances is appreciating the RER and decreasing the external trade competitiveness of Bangladesh; thus, the procedure is slowly bringing about deterioration in the economy of Bangladesh, a process known as Dutch Disease. To counter this, a gradual relaxation of the trade barrier plus promotion of external trade diversification and diversion of the remittances flow from non-tradable sectors to priority investment areas will counteract the adverse consequences of remittances on the Bangladeshi economy in the long run.

This thesis explores the growth effects of remittances by using some extensions to the Solow (1956) growth model. Using a recent approach popularised by Rao, we estimate an extended production function to analyse the long run growth effects of remittances with both the cross country and country specific estimation methods. Our cross country estimates use data from a panel of 40 high remittance recipient countries. In this process we found that, it is necessary to make a distinction between the direct and indirect growth effects of remittances. Existing studies do not make this distinction and estimate only the direct growth effects. Furthermore, they also fail to make a distinction between the transitionary and permanent growth effects of remittances although they clearly state that their main objective is to estimate the latter. We find that the direct growth effects of remittances, as in the existing studies, are insignificant or even negative. However, many development economists believe that the growth effects of remittances are positive and remittances are an important source of funds to invest in human and physical capital. Therefore, the findings by several econometric studies that the direct growth effects of remittances are negligible have become somewhat controversial. This controversy has become more acute because to the best of our knowledge development economists did not produce any econometric results that support their belief. To resolve this controversy, we made the distinction between the direct and indirect growth effects of remittances. Remittances may have large or small indirect growth effects through their effects on a few intermediate variables that have permanent growth effects. Examples of these intermediate channel variables are investment ratio, development of the financial sector, exchange rate and volatility in output etc. We find that such indirect growth effects of remittances are small but positive. However, these indirect growth effects may be country specific. Therefore, we also estimate these indirect growth effects with the country specific data. Remittances may also have other economic effects besides their growth effects. There is convincing and uncontroversial evidence that remittances are pro poor as they help to reduce poverty in the recipient economies. Therefore, we also estimate these welfare effects of remittances with alternative measures of poverty. Our results show that these welfare effects are significant. The thesis raises some methodological issues on estimating the growth effects of remittances or any other growth enhancing variables like trade openness and investment ratio etc. Although it is difficult to resolve these methodological issues in this thesis, the main contribution of this thesis is to show that Rao‘s approach for estimating the permanent growth effects is a pragmatic option. Needless to say, like all other methodological issues, this issue cannot be resolved to the satisfaction of all. Therefore, further analysis and research is necessary into these methodological issues, which is beyond the scope of a single contribution.

Why do international migrants send money home? What are the implications of these monetary flows for developing countries? Long debated by economists and sociologists, these questions have received very little attention in the political science literature. This dissertation argues, however, that remittances—money sent home or “remitted” by international migrants—have significant implications for the study of politics. My main contention is that international migrants assume a more significant welfare burden when their home government’s commitment to social insurance provision is in decline. Remittances, in other words, flow to compensate non-emigrating citizens for state retrenchment and the absence of a robust welfare state. I argue that this “transnational safety net” makes remittance recipients (RRs) less vulnerable to economic instability than neighbors who do not receive this money. All else equal, RRs should be more contented with their economic circumstances and have fewer economic grievances with which to politicize. The income-stabilizing and insurance effect of remittances, then, should reduce public pressure on the state, leaving RRs less motivated to mobilize against and punish incumbents for a poor economy when public safety nets are weak. Evidence comes from an original survey of 768 Mexican households, field interviews, and time-series data published by the Bank of Mexico. Statistical tests reveal that Mexicans abroad remit more to families that do not receive social benefits and send roughly $2.5 million more home for every $10 million reduction in spending on social programs by the Mexican government. Analyses furthermore reveal that despite being very poor on average, RRs tend to enjoy higher levels of income stability, are less likely to identify an economic matter as “the most important problem facing Mexico,” and make more positive and optimistic assessments of the national economy and their own financial circumstances. In the 2006 Mexican presidential election, I find that RRs were up to 15 percent more likely to stay home on election day at the expense of the primary opposition party and significantly less likely to punish the incumbent party with a vote for either of the major opposition parties if they did vote.

This dissertation examines the remitting behavior of a profit-motivated international migrant, who allocates her wealth into consumption and investment in two locations, either in the host country or the country of origin, implemented on her behalf by the household of origin. Both migrant and household are exposed to adverse income shocks, not perfectly correlated. Given limited opportunities to cope with risk, spatial diversification matters. While the literature focuses on the diversification role of remittances for the household of origin, this dissertation looks at the diversification opportunities that remittances offer the migrant. Her absence from the location of origin creates, however, information and contract enforcement problems. The migrant has limited information about the productive opportunities available to the household, its level of diligence, and the incidence of adverse shocks. A theoretical framework shows the dynamic inter-temporal process that defines the allocation of resources across locations. The model allows for altruistic and profit-oriented transfers. Altruistic transfers are exogenous and not correlated with the idiosyncratic shocks. Investment at each location is defined by the migrant’s ability to exploit diversification opportunities. Remittances are affected by the migrant’s risk aversion, the technologies where these transfers are allocated, transaction and agency costs, the impatience of the migrant, and the volatility, correlation and size of the shocks.Numerical approximation techniques and simulations identify the effect of relevant variables on the optimal long-run allocation of investment. Econometric techniques identify behavior under special conditions, such as the presence of transaction costs, information asymmetries, and challenges to enforce contracts. The dissertation uses information from two surveys. One surveys Nicaraguan migrants living in Costa Rica and the other surveys Nicaraguan households with migrants in Costa Rica.Opportunities to monitor the household’s activities are central. The role of monitoring is explored for the case of Nicaraguan migrants who send remittances from Costa Rica. Monitoring is associated to the number of migrant visits back home. Plans to return to the country of origin improve the migrant’s ability to enforce the contract, while information asymmetries may be reduced by signaling by the household through uses of past remittances. Number of trips, the size of the network of relatives, the time spent in the host country by the migrant, the number of additional migrants, and uses of remittances are among key significant variables.The theoretical model is an application of spatial portfolio diversification analysis to the specific circumstances of migrants, which adds to traditional explanations about the determinants of remittances. The migrant’s destination matters, in terms of the opportunities for portfolio diversification. The empirical applications describe ways in which the information and contract enforcement challenges for the migrant may be resolved, leading to greater propensity to remit and larger remittances. While altruistic and insurance-related remittances are anti-cyclical, profit-oriented remittances are pro-cyclical. The resulting wealth allocations have implications for investment in both countries and other macroeconomic implications, beyond the consequences for the livelihood strategies of the household of origin. Determinants of the use of banks as channel for the remittances are also explored.

This dissertation explores the welfare effects of international remittance income, i.e., income earned by migrant workers and sent back to their home country. Remittance income has increased markedly in the last decade, particularly in the developing world. The primary purpose of this dissertation is to quantify the effects of this income on recipient countries. Chapter 2 of this dissertation presents a study of how remittance income affects child welfare in Nepal using the 2003/2004 Nepal Living Standards survey. I examine how remittance income and non-remittance income affect child labor and child education. Specifically, I examine the probability that a child attends school; a childs educational attainment, given that the child attends school; the probability that a child labors; and the amount that a child labors, given that s/he does so. I find that while both income types positively and significantly impact child welfare, the effects of remittance income are much smaller than those of non-remittance income. Chapter 3 presents an Engel curve analysis, in which I examine how remittance and non-remittance income affect consumption of various categories of goods in Nepal, again using the 2003/2004 Nepal Living Standards Survey. I use general additive models to allow remittance and non-remittance income to affect consumption nonparametrically and interactively and calculate elasticities of consumption for both remittance and non-remittance income. Confidence intervals for elasticities of consumption are calculated using a combination of bootrap methods and the method of Krinsky and Robb. I find that the elasticity of consumption is always much less from remittance than from non-remittance income. Chapter 4 presents a macroeconomic analysis of how remittance income affects poverty in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. I use World Bank poverty data on the region to examine how the rate, depth, and severity of poverty are related to GDP, inequality, and remittances in the period from approximately 1998-2003. The poverty data set has been collected and standardized by the World Bank and is an unusually good panel data set on poverty. I find that remittances have no significant impact on poverty in the region. Throughout this dissertation, I find the effects of remittance income to be small. I posit that this is because of the way that remittances are transferred and used. Many remittances in the regions analyzed never enter the formal financial sector and are likely not used to increase permanent income. According to the permanent income hypothesis, income which does not impact permanent income will have smaller effects on consumption.

This dissertation project examines the impact of human migration and remittances on rural household behavior in El Salvador. It specifically focuses on two questions: (1) How is household labor supply allocation affected by migration and remittances? (2) How do remittances affect agricultural production outcomes at the household level? An agricultural household model that integrates migration and remittances predicts that when households are credit constrained they allocate their family labor back to their own farm when remittances are received. Further, the agricultural model suggests that when remittances are received households will invest in the production of riskier cash crops. The data used for the empirical analysis for this project cover six years and were collected in El Salvador in 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. The empirical analysis uses panel data to examine how changes in both the migration status of the household and remittance levels affect different family members' labor allocations. Factors that determine both migration decisions and remittance levels are also estimated. Unlike previous studies, this study finds that it is migration not remittances that affects a family's labor allocation decisions. When a household engages in migration, this increases the hours of on-farm work for all household members (adult males, females, and children) and decreases the hours of off-farm work for adult males. Remittances have no significant affect on household labor allocations. Further, a cross-sectional analysis indicates that migrant females in the United States send more remittances than male migrants. Findings regarding household agricultural outcomes suggest that migration decreases a household's coefficient of variation for agricultural revenue. Further, migrant households dedicate a larger share of their land to their house lot and basic grains production than non-migrant households. Migrant households also decrease the amount of land dedicated to cash crops other than coffee. Migrant households are more active in land rental markets, both renting more land in and renting more land out than non-migrant households. Remittances seem to have relatively little impact on agricultural production activities as compared to migration itself.

This dissertation shows how remittances affect household investment decisions. The investment decision is broken into two components. First, the household allocates expenditures between aggregate consumption and investment bundles. Second, the household determines which investment assets to purchase based on the investment’s expected return and the household’s risk-tolerance. Each decision stage is independent and is modeled separately. The first section of this dissertation attempts to isolate remittance effects by evaluating a household’s budget allocation when composed of aggregate consumption and investment bundles versus single goods. Using panel data from rural Pakistan, households are split into three groups: households receiving remittances from abroad, households receiving remittances from within Pakistan, and non-remittance households. An LES demand system is used to evaluate a household’s budget allocation by analyzing prices and expenditures. The receipt of remittances shows a direct effect on the allocation of total expenditures to investment goods. The estimates show households without remittances value investments as non-essential goods, the opposite of how remittance receiving households value investments. The elasticity of substitution between investment and consumption shows no sign of being affected by remittances. A fixed-effect logit regression further shows remittances have a positive, statistically significant effect on the probability of purchasing investments. The second section of the study evaluates risk-aversion levels of the three types of households. To detach a household’s risk-aversion from remittance effects on the investment decisions for individual goods, the entire portfolio is modeled. Returns to eight investment choices are calculated on a yearly basis using aggregate country wide data for a total of 15 years. A mean-variance portfolio is modified to reflect Islamic banking constraints and is used to calculate the optimal portfolio frontier. The results suggest remittances have little effect on a household’s portfolio selection. Remittances do not affect a household’s risk-aversion level. The portfolio allocations for all household groups are nearly identical, resulting in negligible differences in the portfolio returns and risk levels. All household groups could better optimize their portfolio as all the allocations were found to be inefficient. Despite inefficiencies, the results suggest remittances do not influence the purchase of any specific asset.

This dissertation consists of three papers on development economics and public finance. The first chapter investigates intra household allocation models using a law change as exogenous variation in rights to income transfers in Chile. Using several cross sections I test for changes in households' allocations of cohabitant couples after the law change. I find a 2 percentage point increase in school attendance of children between 14 and 18 years old and boys between 0 and 5 years old, and a decrease of 1 percentage point in the probability of working for men. These results add evidence to the growing literature against the unitary household model. Furthermore, the labor market results are evidence against a model of Nash bargaining presented, and support a tax model where child support is a tax on male's earnings. The second chapter examines the regressivity of the Value Added Tax (VAT) on food when home production is considered. Food expenditure as a share of total expenditure is higher in households with lower income levels. However, households in the lower deciles can obtain their food consumption from non-taxed sources. Using data from El Salvador I investigate whether differences in home production offsets food VAT regressivity. Households should have higher home production when the market price of goods is higher than the cost of home producing. A tax generates a wedge between these prices, and therefore a tax increase should increase home production. I find that the end of a tax exemption to agricultural goods in El Salvador increased home production in the short run by 19%. The third paper, co-authored with Dean Yang, studies the causal effect of remittances on poverty and inequality. We use cross sectional data that allows distinguishing the country where the migrant from the Philippines is located, and this location determined the size of the exchange rate shock resulting from the 1998 Asian crisis. We use this exogenous variation to identify the causal effect of remittances on poverty and income distribution. In migrant origin households, a 10% improvement in the exchange rate leads to a 0.6 percentage point decline in the poverty rate.

This dissertation examines the role of remittances as a strategy to mitigate risk within rural households in an environment characterized by substantial systemic shocks. To accomplish this, a four-survey panel data set is used to analyze the flows of remittances from both national and international migrants for the case of rural households in El Salvador. The period covered by the panel observations (1995-2001) was marked by significant systemic shocks, thereby offering an opportunity to test hypotheses about remittances as informal insurance. The analysis highlights key differences between national and international remittances as informal insurance mechanisms. This dissertation follows a risk sharing approach. The main test is to verify if, controlling for other things, the amount of remittances received by Salvadoran rural households is higher when they must cope with adverse income shocks. Shocks are measured as deviations from income predicted by an earnings function. The main predictions of the model are that the optimal amount of remittances to the rural household in the home country is decreasing in the expected earnings and positively related to negative income shocks of the household. For a domestic migrant, subject to shocks covariant with those that also afflict the rural household, however, the optimum amount of remittances will be lower, compared to an international migrant for which this covariant component does not exist. The econometric results show that both the probability of receiving remittances and the amount of the remittances are decreasing in the expected earnings of the Salvadoran rural household. The empirical results further provide evidence that there is a positive relationship between the amount of remittances and the relative magnitude of negative income shocks. This relationship, however, is significant only for households with international migrants. This result gives empirical support for the greater scope of international remittances as an informal insurance mechanism. Given a risky rural environment and the limitations of formal credit and insurances markets, it appears that some rural households have followed a strategy of using international migration-cum-remittances as an insurance mechanism capable of protecting them even from systemic shocks. In contrast, national migration cannot generate this important outcome.