Directing Remittances to Education with Soft and Hard Commitments : Evidence from a Lab-in-the-Field Experiment and New Product Take-up among Filipino Migrants in Rome

De Arcangelis, Giuseppe ; Joxhe, Majlinda ; McKenzie, David ; Tiongson, Erwin ; Yang, Dean

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACCOUNTING;    AMOUNT OF REMITTANCES;    ANNUAL REMITTANCES;    ASYMMETRIC INFORMATION;    ATM CARD;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-6896
RP-ID  :  WPS6896

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This paper tests how migrants'willingness to remit changes when given the ability todirect remittances to educational purposes using differentforms of commitment. Variants of a dictator game in alab-in-the-field experiment with Filipino migrants in Romeare used to examine remitting behavior under varying degreesof commitment. These range from the soft commitment ofsimply labeling remittances as being for education, to thehard commitment of having funds directly paid to a schooland the student's educational performance monitored.The analysis finds that the introduction of simple labelingfor education raises remittances by more than 15 percent.Adding the ability to directly send this funding to theschool adds only a further 2.2 percent. The informationasymmetry between migrants and their most closely connectedhousehold is randomly varied, but no significant change isfound in the remittance response to these forms ofcommitment as information varies. Behavior in these games isshown to be predictive of take-up of a new financial productcalled EduPay, designed to allow migrants to pay remittancesdirectly to schools in the Philippines. This take-up seemslargely driven by a response to the ability to labelremittances for education, rather than to the hardcommitment feature of directly paying schools.