Remittance Responses to Temporary Discounts: A Field Experiment among Central American Migrants

Kate Ambler, Diego Aycinena and Dean Yang

No 20522, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study the impacts on remittances of offering migrants temporary discounts on remittance transaction fees. We randomly assigned migrants from El Salvador and Guatemala 10-week remittance transaction fee discounts, and assess impacts using administrative transaction data and a post-experiment survey. Temporary discounts lead to substantial increases in the number of transactions and total amount remitted during the discount period. Surprisingly, these increases persist up to 20 weeks after expiration of the discount. We find no evidence that the discounts cause migrants to shift remittances from other remittance channels, or to send remittances on behalf of other migrants. These findings are consistent with naïveté on the part of migrants regarding remittance recipients' reference-dependent preferences.

JEL-codes: F24 J61 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-exp and nep-mig
Note: DEV
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20522.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20522

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20522

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).