This paper examines ethnicity among highly skilled immigrants to the United States. The paper focuses on five classic components of ethnicity -country of birth, race, skin color, language, and religion - among persons admitted to legal permanent residence in the United States in 2003 in the...

This paper examines the determinants of temporary and permanent migration and the impact of the return decision on remittances patterns. Using a new detailed household dataset on migration in the Republic of Moldova, it is shown that return is determined by the economic conditions at home and...

This paper explores the factors that account for the receipt of remittances across households in Moldova who have migrant family members abroad. Unlike most of the existing literature, we approach our research question from the perspective of the recipient household and use it to interpret the...

The issue of migration and development became in the last years highly relevant on the global policy agenda. Countries and international organisations increasingly perceive migration as a phenomenon that can positively impact development in both migrant receiving and sending countries, provided...

For many countries, remittance behaviour by migrants is an important component of their overall international financial flows. To date, the empirical literature has analysed the propensity to remit as a function of migrants’ socio-economic characteristics. However, no studies have fully...

Using a recent Spanish database, we show that remittances respond to cross country differences in portfolio values. This behavior suggests that immigrants are sophisticated economic optimizers who take advantage of opportunities to invest trans-nationally given the networks that immigrants are...

Recent theoretical work shows that precautionary savings increase in response to an increase in first-order risk. In addition, it is known that the welfare state, being an insurance or consumption-smoothing mechanism, reduces the negative welfare effect of future income uncertainty. We build a...

Strong ties with the home country and with the host country can coexist. An altruistic migrant who sends remittances to his family back home assimilates more the more altruistic he is, and also more than a non-remitting migrant. -- Assimilation of migrants ; Acculturation identity ; Links with...

Strong ties with the home country and with the host country can coexist. An altruistic migrant who sends remittances to his family back home assimilates more the more altruistic he is, and also more than a non-remitting migrant. -- Assimilation of migrants ; Acculturation identity ; Links with...

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...