 Remittances and Rashomon- Working Paper 285No 285, Working Papers from Center for Global Development Abstract: Utilizing a novel data set on remittance data for India that matches household surveys to administrative bank data, we investigate the differences in self-reported and actual deposits to Non-Resident Indian (NRI) accounts. There is a striking difference between the perceived and actual frequency, as well as the amount of deposits, to NRI accounts. Our results indicate the presence of non-classical measurement error in the reporting of remittances in the form of deposits to NRI accounts. As a consequence, regression analyses using remittances as an explanatory variable may contain large upward biases instead of the usual attenuation of results under classical measurement error. Instrumental variables estimates are no better; the estimated coefficients from these regressions are more than three times the size of the OLS regression results. The results point to the need to more carefully check the accuracy of the international remittance flows. The wide discrepancies in the Indian case could be both because of inaccuracies in the household survey as well as mis-classification of the Balance of Payment data with some fraction of reported remittances being disguised capital flows (and hence likely to be less stable) rather than current account flows for family maintenance Keywords: Remittances; Measurement Error; Migration (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:wpaper:285 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC. |
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