This paper was updated in March 2015.  Developing countries invest in training skilled workers and can lose part of their investment if those workers emigrate. 

While measured remittances by migrant workers have soared in recent years, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. We review existing explanations for this puzzle and propose three new ones. First, we offer evidence that a large majority of the recent rise in...

Research on migration and development has recently changed, in two ways. First, it has grown sharply in volume, emerging as a proper subfield. Second, while it once embraced principally rural-urban migration and international remittances, migration and development research has broadened to consider ...

Skilled workers have a rising tendency to emigrate from developing countries, raising fears that their departure harms the poor. In response, researchers have proposed a variety of policies designed to tax or restrict high-skill migration. Those policies have been justified on grounds of efficiency—...

Basic economic theory suggests that as poor countries get richer, fewer people want to leave. This idea captivates policymakers in international aid and trade diplomacy. But a long research literature and recent data suggest something very different: Over the course of a “mobility transition&r...

It is time to fundamentally reframe the research agenda on remittances, payments, and development. We describe many of the research questions that now dominate the literature and why they lead us to uninformative answers.