Why Don't Remittances Appear to Affect Growth?
提出三种新解释，说明为何宏观研究难以发现汇款对经济增长的影响：测量变化导致汇款增长假象、跨国回归缺乏统计效力、移民的机会成本造成内生性偏差。
While measured remittances by migrant workers have recently soared, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. We propose three new explanations for this puzzle. First, a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory – arising from changes in measurement. Second, cross‐country regressions may lack power to detect such growth effects. Third, remittances rise primarily with rising emigration, whose opportunity cost to GDP creates endogeneity bias. Migration and remittances clearly have first‐order effects on poverty, migrant households' welfare and global GDP but detecting the effect of remittances on economic growth faces important challenges.