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Summary: This paper conducts a robustness analysis of the impact of diasporas on institutional quality in home countries. Using the Database on Immigrants in OECD Countries (DIOC), we attest that the home country institutional development role of diasporas found in the literature is robust to modifications in terms of the dataset, the measurement of diasporas and the instrumental variable procedures used in our cross‐sectional and panel analyses. The novelty of this paper is that we take the heterogeneity of diasporas into account in terms of their distribution across host countries, their duration of stay, and the level of development of their home countries. As in earlier literature, we find robust evidence that diasporas enhance institutional quality in home countries. We also find that the intensity of the diffusion of advanced institutions from developed host countries to home countries through the international migration channel is weaker with diasporas characterized by shorter average duration of stay and with diasporas from developing home countries. However, this diffusion effect is not significantly related to the distribution of diasporas across OECD host countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the link between local institutional quality in the home country and locational choices of international return migrants. We scrutinize the locational choices of Vietnamese return migrants to the south central and the south regions of Viet Nam in 2014. Binary and multinomial regression models are fitted to identify the influence of migrants' individual attributes and the characteristics of regional destinations within Viet Nam. Our analysis reveals that both individual‐specific and region‐specific variables are significantly related to Vietnamese return migrants' choices when registering for permanent residency back in their home country. More remarkably, we provide compelling evidence of the positive role of institutional quality at the local level in these migration decisions. Moreover, the effect of institutional quality differs with the characteristics of migrants: regions with better institutional quality are more attractive both to younger return migrants and to those who returned from host countries with better institutional quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]