We estimate a multinomial logit model to explain the choice of transfer channel (formal services vs. informal operators or personal transfers) by 1139 pairs of migrants and recipients of remittances in Moldova in 2006. Explanatory variables include socioeconomic characteristics of the migrant...

Donations by migrants to community projects in their home countries ('collective remittances') help to provide local public goods and may promote economic development. We draw on the literatures on migrant remittances and on philanthropy in general to identify possible motives for collective...

Little is known about the drivers of migrant donations to their home countries. Using data on all donations from Filipino migrants administered by the Philippine Commission on Filipinos Overseas between 1990 and 2010, this paper explores which host and home country factors are associated with...

We argue that donors could improve the effectiveness of foreign aid by pursuing complementary and coherent non-aid policies. In particular, we hypothesize that aid from donors that are open to immigration has stronger growth effects than aid from closed donors. We estimate the aid-growth nexus...

The world runs a trade surplus with itself: Exporters report larger values of exports than what importers report as imports. This is a logically impossible but well known empirical fact. Less well known, in recent years, more than 80 percent of the global surplus is a trade surplus that the EU...

We investigate the interplay of language skills and immigrant stocks in determining bilateral FDI out-stocks of OECD reporting countries. Applying a Poisson panel estimator to 2004-2011 data, we find a robust positive effect of bilateral immigrants on bilateral FDI - provided that residents of...

Educational outcomes of children are highly dependent on household and school-level inputs. In poor countries, remittances from migrants can provide additional funds for the education of the left behind. At the same time the absence of migrant parents can affect families' time allocation towards...

Migration contributes to the circulation of goods, knowledge, and ideas. Using community and individual-level data from Moldova, we show that the Emigration episode that started in the late 1990s strongly affected political preferences and electoral outcomes in Moldova during the following...

Increasing labor migration and simultaneous aging of societies are two important demographic developments many poor countries face. Elderly people who are left behind may experience a decrease in welfare when their children migrate. This paper investigates the e ect of migration on various...

This paper analyses the wage premia associated with workers' occupational use of foreign languages in Germany. After eliminating time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity and other confounding factors, sizable returns of about 10 percent to applying fluent English skills are found. Returns to...