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Migration experiences are often associated with some sort of transnational economic activity which connects the past and the present of migrants abroad, and specifically with remittances. Motivations to send money at origin have been deeply investigated at the micro as well as at the macro level, as remittances can affect recipient households’ well-being, investment and consumption levels in the receiving countries and play an insurance role against external shocks. This paper contributes to the literature on migrants’ remittances providing evidence for migrants from Morocco, Peru and Romania, three traditional labor-exporting countries with a medium level of economic development, from three different geographical areas and with different migration patterns to Italy. Exploiting a relatively rich, albeit small-scale, dataset we analyze the spatial distribution of migrants’ nuclear families and households and we build three different migratory profiles, Loners, Pioneers and followers, characterized by the timing and sequence of the migration event with respect to the rest of the nuclear family. Then author test a negative binomial model to describe the variation in the variable ‘remittances amount’. Beyond cross-country variations and after controlling for the most commonly used individual demographic and economic characteristics, our analysis consistently clusters migrants according to their family and household structure in Italy and abroad to explain the total amount of remittances sent to the origin country.

Transnational families where one or more members are employed abroad while others remain back home are likely be characterized by a higher degree of private information relative to households where members are co-resident. Consequently, international migrants, who can only imperfectly monitor and control uses of remittances by family members left behind, may remit less money home if intra-household preferences differ. On the other hand, a sending household's inability to monitor the migrant's financial choices may enable him to privately spend more, thereby remitting less. Using a novel dataset of married male Indian migrants working in Qatar and their wives back home that were interviewed simultaneously but separately, the extent of information asymmetry with respect to overseas earnings is measured by the discrepancy between migrant's report of his earnings and his wife's account. We find that the greater the under-reporting of overseas income by the wife, expressed as a ratio of her account to his own, the lower the annual remittances sent home. The finding demonstrates how remittance flows can be affected by the presence of information gaps arising from imperfect monitoring of intra-household allocations. It also shows the mechanism by which remitters may vary the amount transferred home by exploiting the incomplete information recipients have of foreign earnings. Interventions that improve monitoring of intra-household allocations could potentially enhance the amount of remittances sent.