We randomly assigned male migrant workers in Qatar invitations to a motivational workshop aimed at improving financial habits and encouraging joint decision-making with spouses back home in India. 13-17 months later, we surveyed migrants and wives to estimate intent-to-treat impacts in their transnational households. Wives of treated migrants changed their financial practices, and became more likely to seek out financial education themselves. Treated migrants and their wives became more likely to make joint decisions on money matters. Treatment effects on financial outcomes show potential heterogeneity, with those with lower prior savings saving differentially more than those with higher prior savings.

Background and Objectives: We randomly assigned invitations to a savings-focused financial literacy workshop for migrant Indian workers in Qatar. Via surveys of migrants, as well as their wives remaining behind in India, we provide a unique window into financial decision-making in transnational households. We examine impacts on financial decision-making of the migrant workers, migrants' attempts to influence the financial decision-making of their wives in the home country, migrant beliefs about their wives' behaviors, and the wives' actual behaviors. Method: A randomized control trial approach was used to assign migrants to a control and treatment group. After completing a baseline survey, migrants were randomly offered an invitation to attend a one-time financial education workshop. A follow-up survey was administered 16 months later to all couples. Results: The treatment led to substantial changes in migrant financial practices, and more joint financial decision-making with their wives. Migrants with below-median baseline savings are most responsive to the treatment, increasing their own savings and the remittances sent to their wives. Comparison of treatment effects on financial outcomes reported separately by migrants and wives provides evidence of substantial information asymmetries within transnational households. Conclusions: The fact that a short, simple financial education invitation had identifiable and (in many cases) large effects on financial behaviors and outcomes is one of the key findings of this study. While we cannot tell whether the intervention improved the overall well-being of migrants or their families back home, we do identify a subgroup (migrants with initially low savings) who saw increases in two outcomes of significant interest to economists and policy-makers: savings and remittances. That migrants were induced by a relatively minimal intervention to change important economic behaviors suggests that this population could not have had very strong priors that their previous behaviors were optimal. From a practical standpoint, our results suggest that financial literacy interventions have real potential to change migrant financial behaviors. These findings should be an impetus for further exploration of the impacts of financial literacy interventions in different populations and contexts. Future work might also profitably explore what factors lead to suboptimal financial decision-making in transnational households.

We examine asymmetric information about migrant earnings and its implications for remittance behavior using a sample of Indian households with husbands working overseas in Qatar. On average, wives underreport their husbands' income and underreporting is more prevalent in households with higher earning migrants. The discrepancy in earning reports is strongly correlated with variation in remittances: greater underreporting by wives is associated with lower remittances. We develop an exchange model of remittances with asymmetric information and costly state verification. The optimal remittance contract prescribes a threshold for remittances that invites verification only if unmet. The model's predictions closely match our empirical findings.JEL classification: D13, D82, F22, F24 Article households in El Salvador if their families were unaware of it. 1 This incipient evidence indicates that informational asymmetries about migrants' economic conditions can be a significant factor of remittance behavior, which, even though recognized in the literature (see Docquier 2006, 1143), has hardly been studied. 2 This paper deals with informational asymmetry about migrant earnings and examines, theoretically and empirically, the impact of this asymmetry on remittance flows. Generally, the main obstacle for conducting an empirical analysis is the absence of data on informational asymmetries within split households, which surveys of migrant or household alone cannot possibly provide. We offer a new solution to this problem. We assess informational asymmetries about income earned abroad by collecting migrants' reports about their earnings and contrasting these reports with accounts of their earnings collected from the remittance recipients. To our knowledge, this is one of the first few studies using a matched household dataset that collects cross-reports on variables of interest. 3 We are able to offer new evidence of substantial asymmetry in information within split households. In our representative sample of South Indian migrant households, where husbands are migrant workers in Qatar and wives remain behind in Kerala, India, wives report on average only about 79 percent of their husbands' earnings, which we show is unrelated to any reporting bias. We find that underreporting is not uniform across households-it is more prevalent in households with higher earning migrants. In particular, we observe that the reported earnings ratio-the ratio of the wife's report of her husband's earnings to that of her husband's-decreases in migrant earnings. Importantly, we find that asymmetric information about the migrant's income is strongly correlated with variation in remittances: all else equal, the lower the reported earnings ratio, the smaller the annual remittance sent home.By design, existing remittance models, mainly based on the symmetric information assumption, are not able to account for any differences in cross-reports and, consequently, cannot explain the observed relationship between the reported earnings ratio and remittanc...

What is the effect of trade liberalization on households in developing countries? To what extent do the poor benefit when local markets are made more accommodative to international trade? I empirically analyze the distributional impact of trade policies on households in a low-income country with a large rural economy where labor markets are imperfect. The methodology proposed in this paper, which can be applied to various types of labor market conditions, relates changes in prices attributed to trade reforms to changes in household welfare, income distribution and poverty using theoretically consistent measures of producer and consumer welfare. I investigate the effects on poverty and income distribution of national and international market integration in Vietnam's rice sector and fertilizer market between 1993 and 1998, a period of ongoing market reforms when the national poverty rate fell sharply from 59% to 37%. I find that when the effects of opening the rice and fertilizer market are isolated, Vietnam's agricultural trade reforms did not contribute to a significant improvement in overall household welfare or decline in poverty over this period. Nonetheless, the liberalization exercise can explain about half of the reduction in poverty incidence among farm households. The results also show that liberalization did not exacerbate income inequality, but did generate gains for rural households across the distribution, particularly the poor, at the expense of urban households.