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Many research and policy questions surrounding migration are causal questions. What causes people to migrate What are the consequences of migration for the migrants, their families, and their communities Answering these questions requires dealing with the self-selection inherent in migration choices. Field and natural experiments offer methodological approaches that enable answering these causal questions. This paper discusses the key conceptual and logistical issues that face applied researchers when applying these methods to the study of migration, as well as providing guidance for practitioners and policymakers in assessing the credibility of causal claims. For randomized experiments, this includes providing a framework for thinking through what can be randomized; discussing key measurement and design issues that arise from issues such as migration being a rare event, and in measuring welfare changes when people change locations; as well as discussing ethical issues that can arise. The paper then outlines what makes for a good natural experiment in the context of migration, and discusses the implications of recent econometric work for the use of difference-indifferences, instrumental variables (and especially shift-share instruments), and regression discontinuity methods in migration research. A key lesson from this recent work is that it is not meaningful to talk about “the” impact of migration, but rather impacts are likely to be heterogeneous, affecting both the validity and interpretation of causal estimates.

We experimentally study an intervention to reduce mistreatment of Filipino overseas domestic workers (DWs) by their employers. Encouraging DWs to show their employers a family photo while providing a small gift when starting employment reduced DW mistreatment, increased their job satisfaction, and increased the likelihood of contract extension. While generally unaware of the intervention, DWs' families staying behind become more positive about international labor migration. An online experiment with potential employers suggests that the effect operates through a reduction in employers' perceived social distance from their employees. A simple intervention can protect migrant workers without requiring destination country policy reforms.

A randomized experiment among poor entrepreneurs tested the impact of exogenously inducing higher financial aspirations. In theory, raising aspirations could have positive effects by inducing higher effort, but could also reduce effort if unmet aspirations lead to frustration. Treatment resulted in more ambitious savings goals, but nearly all individuals fell far short of reaching these goals. Two years later, treated individuals had not saved more, and actually had lower borrowing and business investments. Treatment also reduced belief in the amount of control over one’s life. Setting aspirations too high can lead to frustration, leading individuals to reduce their economic investments.

We study a randomly-assigned program providing information on U.S. settlement for new Filipino immigrants. The intervention, a 2.5-hour pre-departure training and an accompanying paper handbook, has no effect on employment, settlement, and subjective wellbeing, but leads immigrants to acquire substantially fewer social network connections. We rationalize these findings with a simple model, showing that information and social network links are substitutes under reasonable assumptions. Consistent with the model, the treatment reduces social network links more when costs of acquiring network links are lower. Offsetting reductions in the acquisition of social network connections can hence reduce the effectiveness of information interventions.

Financial products and transfer schemes are often designed to help individuals improve welfare by following through on intertemporal plans. This paper implements an artefactual field experiment in Malawi to test the ability of households to manage a cash windfall. This study varies whether 474 households receive a payment in cash or through direct deposit into pre-established accounts at a local bank. Payments are made immediately, with one day delay, or with eight days delay. Defaulting the payments into savings accounts leads to higher bank account balances, an effect that persists for several weeks. However, neither savings defaults nor payment delays affect the amount or composition of spending, suggesting that households manage cash effectively without the use of formal financial products.

Implementamos un experimento aleatorio que ofrece a los migrantes salvadoreños fondos de contrapartida para remesas educativas, que se canalizan directamente a un estudiante beneficiario en El Salvador elegido por el migrante. Los emparejamientos conducen a un aumento de los gastos educativos, una mayor asistencia a escuelas privadas y una menor oferta laboral de jóvenes en los hogares de El Salvador conectados con los participantes migrantes del estudio. Encontramos una 'participación' sustancial de las inversiones en educación: por cada $ 1 recibido por los beneficiarios, los gastos en educación aumentan en $ 3.72. No encontramos un desplazamiento de los gastos de otros estudiantes y ningún efecto sobre las remesas. We implement a randomized experiment offering Salvadoran migrants matching funds for educational remittances, which are channeled directly to a beneficiary student in El Salvador chosen by the migrant. The matches lead to increased educational expenditures, higher private school attendance, and lower labor supply of youths in El Salvador households connected to migrant study participants. We find substantial “crowd-in” of educational investments: for each $1 received by beneficiaries, educational expenditures increase by $3.72. We find no shifting of expenditures away from other students, and no effect on remittances.

International migration offers individuals and their families the potential to experience immediate and large gains in their incomes, and offers a large number of other positive benefits to the sending communities and countries. However, there are also concerns about potential costs of migration, including concerns about trafficking and human rights, a desire for remittances to be used more effectively, and concerns about externalities from skilled workers being lost. As a result there is increasing interest in policies which can enhance the development benefits of international migration and mitigate these potential costs. We provide a critical review of recent research on the effectiveness of these policies at three stages of the migration process: pre-departure, during migration, and directed towards possible return. The existing evidence base suggests some areas of policy success: bilateral migration agreements for countries whose workers have few other migration options, developing new savings and remittance products that allow migrants more control over how their money is used, and some efforts to provide financial education to migrants and their families. Suggestive evidence together with theory offers support for a number of other policies, such as lowering the cost of remittances, reducing passport costs, offering dual citizenship, and removing exit barriers to migration. Research offers reasons to be cautious about some policies such as enforcing strong rights for migrants like high minimum wages. Nevertheless, we find the evidence base to be weak for many policies, with no reliable research on the impact of most return migration programs, nor for whether countries should be trying to induce communal remitting through matching funds.

We test the predictions of a behavioral model of transactional electoral politics in the context of a randomized anti-vote-selling intervention in the Philippines. We model selling one's vote as a temptation good: it creates positive utility for the future self at the moment of voting, but not for past selves who anticipate the vote-sale. We also allow keeping or breaking promises regarding vote-selling to affect utility. Voters who are at least partially sophisticated about their vote-selling temptation can thus use promises not to vote-sell as a commitment device. An invitation to promise not to vote-sell is taken up by a majority of respondents, reduces vote-selling, and has a larger effect in electoral races with smaller vote-buying payments. The more effective promise treatment reduces vote-selling in the smallest-stakes election by 10.9 percentage points. Inviting voters to make another type of promise - to accept vote-buying payments, but to nonetheless vote your conscience - is significantly less effective. The results are consistent with voters being partially (but not fully) sophisticated about their vote-selling temptation.

We investigate the determinants of giving in a lab-in-the-field experiment with large stakes. Study participants in urban Mozambique play dictator games where their counterpart is the closest person to them outside their household. Dictators share more with counterparts when they have the option of giving in kind (in the form of goods), compared to giving that must be in cash. Qualitative post-experiment responses suggest that this effect is driven by a desire to control how recipients use gifted resources. Standard economic determinants such as the rate of return to giving and the size of the endowment also affect giving, but the effects of even large changes in these determinants are significantly smaller than the effect of the in-kind option. Our results support theories of giving where the utility of givers depends on the composition (not just the level) of gift-recipient expenditures, and givers thus seek control over transferred resources.

We use an original panel dataset of migrant departures from the Philippines to identify the responsiveness of migrant numbers and wages to GDP shocks in destination countries. We find a large significant elasticity of migrant numbers to GDP shocks at destination, but no significant wage response. This is consistent with binding minimum wages for migrant labor. This result implies that labor market imperfections that make international migration attractive also make migrant flows more sensitive to global business cycles. Difference-in-differences analysis of a minimum wage change for maids confirms that minimum wages bind and demand is price sensitive without these distortions.

This paper reports the results of a field experiment that randomly assigned smallholder cash crop farmers formal savings accounts. In collaboration with a microfinance institution in Malawi, the authors tested two primary treatments, offering either: 1)"ordinary"accounts, or 2) both ordinary and"commitment"accounts. Commitment accounts allowed customers to restrict access to their own funds until a future date of their choosing. A control group was not offered any account but was tracked alongside the treatment groups. Only the commitment treatment had statistically significant effects on subsequent outcomes. The effects were positive and large on deposits and withdrawals immediately prior to the next planting season, agricultural input use in that planting, crop sales from the subsequent harvest, and household expenditures in the period after harvest. Across the set of key outcomes, the commitment savings treatment had larger effects than the ordinary savings treatment. Additional evidence suggests that the positive impacts of commitment derive from keeping funds from being shared with one's social network.

This paper draws lessons from an original randomized experiment in Malawi. In order to understand why roads in relatively good condition in rural areas may not be used by buses, a minibus service was subsidized over a six-month period over a distance of 20 kilometers to serve five villages. Using randomly allocated prices for use of the bus, this experiment demonstrates that at very low prices, bus usage is high. Bus usage decreases rapidly with increased prices. However, based on the results on take-up and minibus provider surveys, the experiment demonstrates that at any price, low (with high usage) or high (with low usage), a bus service provider never breaks even on this road. This can contribute to explain why walking or cycling is so widespread on most rural roads in Sub-Saharan Africa. In terms of policy implications, this experiment explains that motorized services need to be subsidized; otherwise a road in good condition will most probably not lead to provision of service at an affordable price for the local population.

How do borrowers respond to improvements in a lender's ability to punish defaulters? This paper reports the results of a randomized field experiment in rural Malawi that examines the impact of fingerprinting borrowers in a context where a unique identification system is absent. Fingerprinting allows the lender to more effectively use dynamic repayment incentives: withholding future loans from past defaulters while rewarding good borrowers with better loan terms. Consistent with a simple model of borrower heterogeneity and information asymmetries, fingerprinting led to substantially higher repayment rates for borrowers with the highest ex ante default risk, but had no effect for the rest of the borrowers. The change in repayment rates is driven by reductions in adverse selection (smaller loan sizes) and lower moral hazard (for example, less diversion of loan-financed fertilizer from its intended use on the cash crop).

The decision of whether or not to migrate has far-reaching consequences for the lives of individuals and their families. But the very nature of this choice makes identifying the impacts of migration difficult, since it is hard to measure a credible counterfactual of what the person and their household would have been doing had migration not occurred. Migration experiments provide a clear and credible way for identifying this counterfactual, and thereby allowing causal estimation of the impacts of migration. We provide an overview and critical review of the three strands of this approach: policy experiments, natural experiments, and researcher-led field experiments. The purpose is to introduce readers to the need for this approach, give examples of where it has been applied in practice, and draw out lessons for future work in this area.

This paper reviews the relationship between international migration and human development. First, it reviews what we know about the factors that drive migration from developing to developed countries. Second, it reviews existing knowledge about the impact of international migration and remittances on the economic and human development of migrants’ source countries. These first two sections of the paper are accompanied by an assessment of the gaps in our knowledge that need to be filled with further research. The last section of the paper outlines policies that could help raise the development impact of migration and remittances. First, governments should extend absentee voting rights to overseas citizens. In addition, facilitating migrants’ access to and use of financial services could bring substantial benefits. Furthermore, governments can profitably devote self-discovery and enterprise promotion efforts to small-scale activities. Finally, there could be substantial benefits from encouraging overseas citizens to retire at home while taking advantage of accumulated retirement benefits from their migration host countries.

Does production risk suppress the demand for credit? We implemented a randomized field experiment to ask whether provision of insurance against a major source of production risk induces farmers to take out loans to adopt a new crop technology. The study sample was composed of roughly 800 maize and groundnut farmers in Malawi, where by far the dominant source of production risk is the level of rainfall. We randomly selected half of the farmers to be offered credit to purchase high-yielding hybrid maize and groundnut seeds for planting in the November 2006 crop season. The other half of farmers were offered a similar credit package, but were also required to purchase (at actuarially fair rates) a weather insurance policy that partially or fully forgave the loan in the event of poor rainfall. Surprisingly, take-up was lower by 13 percentage points among farmers offered insurance with the loan. Take-up was 33.0% for farmers who were offered the uninsured loan. There is suggestive evidence that reduced take-up of the insured loan was due to farmers already having implicit insurance from the limited liability clause in the loan contract: insured loan take-up was positively correlated with farmer education, income, and wealth, which may proxy for the individual's default costs. By contrast, take-up of the uninsured loan was uncorrelated with these farmer characteristics.

A basic theoretical result is that if there is a Pareto-efficient allocation of risk across individual entities (in this case, individual household members) in a risk-sharing arrangement, individual consumption should not be affected by idiosyncratic income shocks. Data and Sample Construction The empirical analysis uses data from linked household surveys conducted by the Philippine National Statistics Office covering a nationally representative household sample: the Labor Force Survey, the Survey on Overseas Filipinos, the Family Income and Expenditure Survey, and the Annual Poverty Indicators Survey. The variables included in the vector of controls, Wh, are a set of household characteristics in the first period (January June 1997): an indicator for urban location; five indicators for the household head's highest level of education completed (elementary, some high school, high school, some college, and college or more; less than elementary omitted); six indicators for head's occupation ( professional, clerical, service, production, other, not working; agricultural omitted); and log per capita household For example, a need to accumulate resources for a large household purchase (such as a vehicle) or some other lump-sum payment (tuition, medical expenses) might lead to both increased remittances, increased domestic labor supply, and increased domestic income. Table 4 presents the results from OLS and instrumental variable regressions where the outcome variable is the change in household expenditures between the January June 1997 and April September 1998 reporting periods, expressed as a share of initial (January June 1997) household expenditures. This may reflect the fact that international migration requires fixed up-front costs (such as fees to recruitment agencies), so that households facing credit and savings constraints become more willing or able to pay the fixed costs when current income increases. Impact of Domestic Income Shock on All Outcomes, 1997 98: Fixed Effect OLS and Instrumental Variable Estimates, Controlling for Exchange Rate Shock, Migrant Households Only Migrant households Ordinary least squares 20.080* (0.042) 0.500*** (0.071) 20.032 (0.021) Instrumental variable 20.639** (0.219) 0.256 (0.169) 20.107 (0.176) Outcome Total remittance Total expenditure Overseas worker indicator Number of observations 1,655 1,655 *Significant at 10 percent level; **Significant at 5 percent level A key question is whether remittance responses to income shocks depend on the performance or availability of alternative methods of coping with risk, such as asset sales, credit markets, and reciprocal transfer networks. One reason for the finding of such large responses of remittances to rainfall-driven income shocks could be that such shared shocks make it more difficult to access credit or interhousehold assistance networks that normally help households cope with risk. Policies to facilitate remittances include strengthening financial infrastructure and payment systems to lower the cost and broaden the reach of formal remittance channels.