Remittances and the Brain Drain Revisited: The Microdata Show that More Educated Migrants Remit More

By Albert Bollard, David J. McKenzie, Melanie Morten, Hillel Rapoport. Social Science Research Network, 2009

232 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Two of the most salient trends surrounding the issue of migration and development over the past two decades are the large rise in remittances, and an increased flow of skilled migration. However, recent literature based on cross-country regressions has claimed that more educated migrants remit less, leading to concerns that further increases in skilled migration will hamper remittance growth. This paper revisits the relationship between education and remitting behavior using microdata from surveys of immigrants in 11 major destination countries. The data show a mixed pattern between education and the likelihood of remitting, and a strong positive relationship between education and the amount remitted conditional on remitting. Combining these intensive and extensive margins gives an overall positive effect of education on the amount remitted. The microdata then allow investigation as to why the more educated remit more. The analysis finds that the higher income earned by migrants, rather than characteristics of their family situations, explains much of the higher remittances.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/229f99b3e33da8c7fada70725f4737da9e33f39b

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In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

ONLINE APPENDIX: A GLOBAL VIEW OF C ROSS-BORDER MIGRATION (2014, unknown): “However, Bollard et al. (2011) use micro-data and find results that point in the opposite direction.”
The Economics of Temporary Migrations (2016, background): “24 See also Bollard et al. (2011) for a detailed discussion of highly educated migrants’ remittance behavior from a number of destination countries.”
Do remittances improve income inequality? An instrumental variable quantile analysis of the Kenyan case (2016, background): “6 As noted before, this may be due to the fact that migration opportunities (and hence remittances) aremore accessible to middle- and upper-class households due tomigration policies, moving costs, and wealth constraints (Chiswick, 1978; Chiquiar and Hanson, 2002; Bollard et al., 2011).”