On altruism and remittances

Alexis Antoniades, Ganesh Seshan, Roberto Weber and Robertas Zubrickas

No 131, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: We provide a direct test of the impact of altruism on remittances. From a sample of 105 male migrant workers from Kerala, India working in Qatar, we elicit the propensity to share with others from their responses in a dictator game, and use it as a proxy for altruism. When the entire sample is considered, we find that only migrants' income robustly explains remittances. Altruism does not seem to matter. However, we document a strong positive relationship between altruism and remittances for those migrants that report a loan obligation back home, which is nearly half the sample. We explain the role of loan obligations with a standard remittance model, extended with reference-dependent preferences.

Keywords: Remittances; altruism; reference-dependent preferences; dictator game; Qatar (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 O12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-hpe, nep-mig and nep-soc
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:econwp:131

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