The rising number of foreign workers in Italy during the last fifteen years has led to a conspicuous increase in the amount of remittances sent abroad. In this paper we examine the determinants of remittance outflows originated in Italy and transferred abroad through registered financial intermediaries. After controlling for a wide set of socio-economic regressors, we document a strong positive relation between remittances and the cost of travel between Italy and the migrants’ respective home countries. We interpret this result as indirect evidence of unrecorded flows, since the relation between remittances and travel cost should be non-significant unless geographical proximity permits remitters to switch to informal (nonobservable) transmission mechanisms. Moreover, using data on temporal and monetary costs for a subset of bilateral corridors, we also find remittances to be negatively correlated with high transaction costs and low speed of transfer. We rely on this empirical evidence and on a model of migrants’ remitting behavior to present new strategies for estimating the size of the informal outflow.

中文翻译：

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距离越远，汇款越多？汇款行为，差旅成本和非正式渠道的规模

在过去的十五年中，在意大利的外国工人人数不断增加，导致寄往国外的汇款数量明显增加。在本文中，我们研究了源自意大利并通过注册金融中介机构转移到国外的汇款流出的决定因素。在控制了广泛的社会经济回归因素之后，我们证明了汇款与意大利与移民各自母国之间的旅行费用之间有很强的积极关系。我们将此结果解释为未记录流量的间接证据，因为汇款与差旅费用之间的关系应该不重要，除非地理位置接近允许汇款者转而使用非正式（不可观察）的传输机制。此外，使用有关部分双边走廊的时间和金钱成本的数据，我们还发现，汇款与高交易成本和低转账速度呈负相关。我们依靠这一经验证据和移民的举止行为模型来提出新的策略，以估算非正式流出的规模。