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While the pre-1914 mass migrations have been widely studied, the related pattern of emigrants' remittances is still largely untouched. This article aims at filling this gap by analyzing the contribution of remittances to financial stability. In the optimum currency area theory, labor mobility can ease the adjustment mechanism for countries under fixed exchange rate regimes. We confirm this claim by showing that emigrants' remittances reduced the incidence of financial disturbances among a sample of emerging economies characterized by substantial emigration. This result underscores the benefits for emerging economies from opening up to international factor flows, despite the associated financial turbulence."A fantastic rain of gold." Thus observers in the decades between the nineteenth and the twentieth century described the influx of capital toward Italy generated by emigration remittances. These flows were spread piecemeal across the countryside of the entire peninsula, especially into the poorest regions of marginal mountain agriculture. 1 onfronted with high migration outflows, a number of developing nations have seen in the financial manna of remittances a way out of their economic deadlock. A recent estimate evaluates total flows remitted in 2007 above 318 billion dollars, of which developing nations captured around 75 percent. 2 These sizeable figures have attracted the attention of growing numbers of researchers, policymakers, and

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The half-century before World War I has been characterized as the first age of financial globalization. This paper focuses on the role and significance of the bondholders' organizations for the governance of this market. I argue that the outcome of these institutions depended on two dimensions: the institutional variation that characterized these organizations and their strategic interaction. These aspects are addressed using a model of sovereign debt with constant renegotiation. An original data set with information on the settlement of defaulted debts in the period 1870-1913 is used to test the implications of the model. Empirical results support the premise that the quality of bondholders' representation matters for the terms of settlement and the costs of renegotiation. Renegotiation-friendly but not debtor-friendly organizations yielded the best ex post results for their members. The representation of bondholders' interests by the issue banks, on the other hand, produced inferior outcomes.

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