On the effect of mobile phone on migrant remittances: A closer look at international transfers

Recent empirical studies based on surveys bring evidence that international remittances are more the result of familial intertemporal contracts than self-insurance motivations. Exploiting transaction-level remittance data carried out by 3294 migrants between 2004 and 2009 in France from a mobile money transfer service to recipients located in Sub-Sahara Africa, Middle East, Eastern Europe and Madagascar, we find using descriptive statistics and econometric tests that migrants send preferably more money to themselves than to family and non-family members. This result tends to support the idea that the mobile technology impacts migrant remittances and then the standard findings in the remittance literature as migrants seem to be more concerned by the accumulation of savings (self-insurance motivations) than about altruistic or household insurance motivations.