Essays On The Interaction Between Migration And Sending Communities

This dissertation is comprised of three chapters on the interaction between migrants and their source regions applied to China and Vietnam. The first chapter examines whether remittances are related to receivers’trust and trustworthiness in Vietnam. Using a combination of a field experiment conducted in2010and the "2002Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey", the chapter finds that while internal remittances have no significant relationship to trusting behavior, international remittances demonstrate a significantly positive connection. On the other hand, international remittances are negatively related to trustworthiness, while internal remittances are positively associated. Besides, this study finds that the level of trustworthiness is higher in the south than in the north. The second chapter explores the role of children by age and by gender as a motive for return migration in China by using a rural household survey conducted in Wuwei County (Anhui province) in2008. Resorting to a discrete time proportional hazard model and a binary Probit model to estimate respectively the determinants of migration duration for both on-going migrants and return migrants, and the return intentions of on-going migrants, the chapter finds consistent results regarding the role of left-behind children as a significant motive for return. The last chapter examines the impact of the migration experience on individuals’choice of being self-employed upon their return to their home villages. By using the same data of Wuwei survey, the chapter finds that return migrants are more likely to be self-employed than non-migrants, and that both return savings and the frequency of job changes during migration increase the likelihood for return migrants to become self-employed.