Remittances and relative concerns in rural China

Alpaslan Akay, Olivier Bargain, Corrado Giulietti, Juan D. Robalino and Klaus Zimmermann ()
Additional contact information
Alpaslan Akay: GU - Göteborgs Universitet = University of Gothenburg, IZA - Institute for the Study of Labor

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The paper investigates the impact of remittances on the relative concerns of households in rural China. Using the Rural to Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) dataset we estimate a series of subjective well-being functions to simultaneously explore relative concerns with respect to income and remittances. Our results show that although rural households experience substantial welfare loss due to income comparisons, they gain well-being by comparing their remittances with those received by their reference group. In other words, we find evidence of a "status effect" with respect to income and of a "signal effect" of similar magnitude with respect to remittances. This finding is robust to various specifications, alternative reference group definitions, controls for the endogeneity of remittances and selective migration, as well as the use of migrants' net contribution to household income.

Keywords: Positional concerns; Remittances; Subjective well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published in China Economic Review, 2016, Special Issue on Human Capital, Labor Markets, and Migration, 37, pp.191--207. ⟨10.1016/j.chieco.2015.12.006⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Remittances and relative concerns in rural China (2016)
Working Paper: Remittances and Relative Concerns in Rural China (2015)
Working Paper: Remittances and Relative Concerns in Rural China (2015)
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:hal:journl:hal-01447860

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2015.12.006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().