Trois essais sur les tranferts de fonds des migrants

This thesis studies migrants' remittances and aims first at understanding the reasons why migrants send remittances to their families and communities back home. We focus in particular on the role played by social norms in the decision to remit. In an imperfect information set-up, we show that in order to increase their prestige in the eyes of left home families and friends, migrants may decide to send home larger amounts of remittances and hence accept a worsening of their living conditions in the host country. This work also aims at analyzing the impact of remittances on recipient economies, and especially on the labor supply of recipient households. We build a two-period game with imperfect information about the residents' real economic situation, and show that some residents may reduce their labor supply in order to increase the amounts remitted by altruistic migrants. The latter respond to such opportunistic behavior, and residents who really are victims of a bad economic outlook are penalized ; they can then decide to implement a signaling strategy by drastically cutting their working hours, thus further enhancing their precarity. Finally, this thesis explores the relationship between remittances and migration, especially when remittances are invested. Building a model of migratory equilibria, we show that, in equilibrium, optimal remittances and number of migrants are positively related. We use data from twenty ve countries from Eastern Europe and Central Asia in 2000 in order to confirm this implication of our model. ; Cette thèse s'interroge sur les transferts de fonds des migrants et poursuit trois objectifs. Elle vise tout d'abord à comprendre les raisons qui poussent les migrants à envoyer des fonds à leur famille restée au pays ainsi qu'à leur communauté d'origine. Nous étudions en particulier sur le rôle joué par les normes sociales dans la décision de transfert. Dans un cadre d'information imparfaite, nous montrons qu'an d'accroître leur statut social auprès de leur communauté d'origine, les ...