Abstract
Abstract There is a well-established literature that finds a strong causal association between remittance flows and economic growth and poverty. Owing to the poverty-alleviating and income-generating effects of remittances, it may theoretically reduce crime by increasing the opportunity cost of committing crime. This paper studies the effects of remittance receipts on crime outcomes in India. The identification strategy, exploits the variation in rainfall as an instrument for remittance receipts. The results suggest that remittance receipts have a negative effect on violent crimes and a positive effect on nonviolent crimes. Since remittance flows mean that more economic resources are available, remittances provide an incentive for certain crimes that thrive in the presence of economic resources. Therefore, an important implication of this result is that as remittance receipts increase income and welfare, there is a diverse effect on the costs and benefits of different types of crimes. It may result in unfavorable outcomes in the form of increases in certain nonviolent crimes.
Highlights
Human migration is as old a phenomenon as the history of human beings themselves
This section presents and discusses the results of the study. It describes the impact of remittances received on crime, first using the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator
This article explores the relation between crimes and remittance receipts in Indian districts using cross-sectional data from the 64th round of the National Sample Survey (NSS)
Summary
Human migration is as old a phenomenon as the history of human beings themselves. People have been consistently moving from one place to another, throughout history, in search of opportunities and economic gains. Because remittances have grown phenomenally in the last few decades and are viewed as the most stable form of financial flows, they have become an important source of income for developing countries Their impact on growth indicators is important. Considerable evidence from various studies, such as Gupta et al (2009), Adams and Page (2005), Acosta et al (2008), Yang (2008), and Pradhan and Mahesh (2016), has shown that remittance flows have reduced poverty, income inequality, and unemployment in recipient countries. They find that remittances have aided overall development in poorer countries and when used for consumption smoothing, a multiplier effect ensues. The rest of the article is organized as follows: section 2 describes the empirical framework, section 3 describes the data sources and variables, section 4 discusses the results, section 5 presents the robustness checks, and section 6 concludes
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