This chapter reviews the recent theoretical and empirical economic literature on migrants' remittances. It is divided between a microeconomic section on the determinants of remittances and a macroeconomic section on their growth effects. At the micro level we first present in a fully harmonized...

Standard homo economicus lives in a world of complete markets and maximizes utility which is a function of his personal consumption. This approximation cannot account for parents making transfers to adult children, children taking care of old parents, nor for gifts, inheritance and many other...

Despite extensive use of bargaining models in economics and despite Becker's insistence on the importance of altruism in families, the theoretical literature on bargaining ignores altruism and assumes that everyone is an egoist. This paper shows that incorporating altruism into cooperative...

This paper introduces labor supply considerations and labor earnings uncertainty into a parent-child framework in the presence of "merit goods". I investigate the implications of various parental bequest rules on the effort decisions of the offspring, where the parent cannot perfectly observe...

The afro-descendent people of the Sanquianga region in the Colombian Pacific Coast live under particularly extreme poverty conditions. Although highly integrated to markets through very frequent interactions, their access to basic social services and stable income generating activities are...

El objetivo de este trabajo es construir un modelo de altruismo endógeno. El altruismo es una actitud que influencia nuestras acciones hacia los otros. El modelo presentado asume que esta influencia también opera en la dirección opuesta: es decir, los agentes modifican su nivel de altruismo...

What makes individuals conform or diverge after observing prosocial or selfish behavior by others? We study experimentally how social comparison (observing a peer’s behavior) interacts with identity motives for cooperation. Participants play two games. We increase the strength of the identity...

What makes individuals conform or diverge after observing prosocial or selfish behavior by others? We study experimentally how social comparison (observing a peer’s behavior) interacts with identity motives for cooperation. Participants play two games. We increase the strength of the identity...

The aim of this article is to identify the main determinants of Italians’ leaving-home decisions. We use data from the Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) by the Bank of Italy. The empirical study is performed by cross-section probit and panel-probit estimation. Contrary to the...

In this paper, we examine how children care for their elderly parents and the motives of these family transfers, accounting for interactions between parents and their different children. We study a theoretical model of intergenerational transfers based on altruism, where siblings care for their...