Can international migration promote better institutions at home by raising the demand for political accountability? In order to examine this question, we designed a behavioral measure of the population's desire for better governance. A postcard was distributed to households with the pledge that,...

Fluency in (or ease to quickly learn) the language of the destination country plays a key role in the transfer of human capital from the source country to another country and boosts the immigrant's rate of success at the destination's labor market. This suggests that the ability to learn and...

Many empirical studies on the determinants of international migration flows rely exclusively on macro data, and do not account for migrants' self-selection. We analyze a very interesting episode in international migration for which we are able to gather individual-level data covering all...

Fluency in (or ease to quickly learn) the language of the destination country plays a key role in the transfer of human capital from the source country to another country and boosts the immigrant’s rate of success at the destination’s labor market. This suggests that the ability to learn and...

Significant income gains from migrating from poorer to richer countries have motivated unilateral (source-country) policies facilitating labor emigration. However, their effectiveness is unknown. We conducted a large-scale randomized experiment in the Philippines testing the impact of...

Do information flows matter for remittance behavior? We design and implement a randomized control trial to quantitatively assess the role of communication between migrants and their contacts abroad on the extent and value of remittance flows. In the experiment, a random sample of 1,500 migrants...

Destination countries are progressively shifting towards selective immigration policies. These can effectively increase migrants' average education even if one allows for endogenous schooling decisions and education policies at origin. Still, more selective immigration policies reduce social...

Do information flows matter for remittance behavior? We design and implement a randomized control trial to quantitatively assess the role of communication between migrants and their contacts abroad on the extent and value of remittance flows. In the experiment, a random sample of 1,500 migrants...

Does return migration affect entrepreneurship? This question has important implications for the debate on the economic development effects of migration for origin countries. The existing literature has, however, not addressed how the estimation of the impact of return migration on...

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...