Emigration and democracy

Migration is an important and yet neglected determinant of institutions.This paper investigates the effect of emigration on the quality of home-country institutions. Using consider cross-sectional as well as dynamic-panel regressions for a large sample of developing countries, we find that openness to emigration (as measured by the general emigration rate) has a positive effect on the quality of institutions (as measured by standard democracy and economic freedom indices) in the migrants’ home countries. The results are robust to a wide range of specifications and estimation methods.