We examine the role of the Indian diaspora in the outsourcing of work to India. Our data are taken from oDesk, the world’s largest online platform for outsourced contracts. Despite oDesk minimizing many of the frictions that diaspora connections have traditionally overcome, diaspora...

In recent years, the economics of migration literature has shown a substantial growth in papers exploring host country impacts beyond the labour market. Specifically, researchers have begun to shift their attention from labour market and fiscal changes, towards exploring what we might call "the...

This paper shows that utility differences between the self-employed and employees increase with financial development. This effect is not explained by increased profits but by an increased value of non-monetary benefits, in particular job independence. We interpret these findings by building a...