Do Migrants Improve Governance at Home? Evidence from a Voting Experiment

Catia Batista and Pedro Vicente

The World Bank Economic Review, 2011, vol. 25, issue 1, 77-104

Abstract: Can international migration promote better institutions at home by raising the demand for political accountability? A behavioral measure of the population's desire for better governance was designed to examine this question. A postcard was distributed to households promising that if enough postcards were mailed back, results from a survey module on perceived corruption would be published in the national media. Data from a tailored household survey were used to examine the determinants of this behavioral measure of demand for political accountability (undertaking the costly action of mailing the postcard) and to isolate the positive effect of international emigration using locality-level variation. The estimated effects are robust to the use of instrumental variables, including past migration and macro shocks in the destination countries. The estimated effects can be attributed mainly to migrants who emigrated to countries with better governance, especially migrants who return home. Copyright , Oxford University Press.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (146)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/wber/lhr009 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Migrants Improve Governance at Home? Evidence from a Voting Experiment (2011)
Working Paper: Do Migrants Improve Governance at Home? Evidence from a Voting Experiment (2011)
Working Paper: Do Migrants Improve Governance at Home? Evidence from a Voting Experiment (2010)
Working Paper: Do Migrants Improve Governance at Home? Evidence from a Voting Experiment (2009)
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:oup:wbecrv:v:25:y:2011:i:1:p:77-104

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The World Bank Economic Review is currently edited by Eric Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik

More articles in The World Bank Economic Review from World Bank Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().