Full Citation
Title: Essays on Household Economics and Remittances
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2013
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Abstract: Understanding how families make economic decisions about how to allocate scarce household resources is crucial for the development and implementation of effective development policy. This dissertation investigates three specific questions related to this broad area of research. The first chapter demonstrates the importance of information asymmetries in transnational households, where physical distance between family members can make information barriers especially acute. I implement an experiment among 1,300 Salvadoran migrants in Washington, DC and their family members in El Salvador that examines how (1) changing the ability of participants to monitor each other and (2) revealing migrant preferences can affect the sending and spending of remittances. Migrants make an incentivized decision about how much of a cash windfall to keep and how much to send home, and recipients decide how to allocate the spending of a remittance. Migrants remit significantly more when their choice is observed by recipients, and this effect is concentrated among pairs where recipient ability to punish migrants is plausibly high. The results support a model of remittance sending where migrants react strategically to being monitored, but only when recipients can enforce remittance agreements. Recipients make spending choices closer to the migrants preferences when they are revealed, suggesting that recipients choices may be inadvertently affected by imperfect information on migrant preferences. Together, these results indicate that information imperfections in families are varied and can affect resource allocation in both strategic and inadvertent ways.
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Authors: Miglietta Ambler, Catherina
Institution: University of Michigan
Department: Economics
Advisor: Professor Dean C. Yang
Degree: Ph.D
Publisher Location: Michigan
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Family and Marriage, Other
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