Volume 74, Issue 1 p. 126-152
Original Article

How Robust Is the Evidence on the Impact of Diasporas on Institutional Quality in Home Countries?

Ngoc Thi Minh TranMichael P. CameronJacques Poot

Jacques Poot

Ngoc Thi Minh Tran Corresponding author School of Accounting, Finance and Economics, University of Waikato, New Zealand and Faculty of Economics, University of Economics and Law, Vietnam National University - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Email: ngocminh@gmail.com ORCID: 0000-0001-5477-2573. Michael P. Cameron School of Accounting, Finance and Economics, University of Waikato, New Zealand and National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis (NIDEA), University of Waikato, New Zealand. Email: michael.cameron@waikato.ac.nz ORCID: 0000-0002-4296-3775. Jacques Poot Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands and National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis (NIDEA), University of Waikato, New Zealand. Email: h.j.poot@vu.nl. ORCID: 0000-0003-4735-9283. We gratefully acknowledge the insightful and challenging comments of the reviewers. The work to address their comments greatly improved the paper. We also wish to thank the corresponding editor, Professor David Stadelmann, for his encouragement and guidance during the revision process.

Replication files are provided in the supplementary material.

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First published: 12 August 2020
Citations: 3

Summary

This paper conducts a robustness analysis of the impact of diasporas on institutional quality in home countries. Using the Database on Immigrants in OECD Countries (DIOC), we attest that the home country institutional development role of diasporas found in the literature is robust to modifications in terms of the dataset, the measurement of diasporas and the instrumental variable procedures used in our cross-sectional and panel analyses. The novelty of this paper is that we take the heterogeneity of diasporas into account in terms of their distribution across host countries, their duration of stay, and the level of development of their home countries. As in earlier literature, we find robust evidence that diasporas enhance institutional quality in home countries. We also find that the intensity of the diffusion of advanced institutions from developed host countries to home countries through the international migration channel is weaker with diasporas characterized by shorter average duration of stay and with diasporas from developing home countries. However, this diffusion effect is not significantly related to the distribution of diasporas across OECD host countries.

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