A Fantastic Rain of Gold: European Migrants' Remittances and Balance of Payments Adjustment During the Gold Standard Period
研究了1914年前欧洲移民汇款对新兴经济体金融稳定的贡献，发现汇款减少了金融动荡，支持了最优货币区理论中劳动力流动的调节作用。
While the pre-1914 mass migrations have been widely studied, the related pattern of emigrants' remittances is still largely untouched. This article aims at filling this gap by analyzing the contribution of remittances to financial stability. In the optimum currency area theory, labor mobility can ease the adjustment mechanism for countries under fixed exchange rate regimes. We confirm this claim by showing that emigrants' remittances reduced the incidence of financial disturbances among a sample of emerging economies characterized by substantial emigration. This result underscores the benefits for emerging economies from opening up to international factor flows, despite the associated financial turbulence. “A fantastic rain of gold.” Thus observers in the decades between the nineteenth and the twentieth century described the influx of capital toward Italy generated by emigration remittances. These flows were spread piecemeal across the countryside of the entire peninsula, especially into the poorest regions of marginal mountain agriculture . 1