Volume 11 (2020): Issue 1 (January 2020)

In this article, we employ a panel household survey from Tajikistan to study labor migrants’ location choices in Russia. We find that labor migrants from Tajikistan consider a wide variety of economic, demographic, and geographical characteristics of Russian regions when making location choices. We also find that experienced migrants are less responsive to current regional characteristics that might suggest path dependence in destination choices by experienced migrants.

The barriers faced by Chinese rural–urban migrants to access social services, particularly education, in host cities could help explain why the majority of them choose to leave their children behind. We identified the causal impacts of school fees by instrumenting for it with unexpected shocks to the city’s public education spending. Our findings suggest that higher fees deter migrant workers from bringing their children with them, especially their daughters, reduce the number of children they bring, and increase educational remittances to rural areas for the children left behind. Increases in school fees mostly affect vulnerable migrant workers and could have stronger impacts during an economic crisis. These findings hold for different model specifications and robustness checks.

Migration has manifested itself to historic highs, creating divisive views among politicians, policy makers, and individuals. The present paper studies the Europeans’ attitudes toward immigration, focusing particularly on the role of social capital. Based on 267,282 respondents from 22 countries and over the period 2002–2014, we find that despite the eventful past years, Europeans, on average, are positive toward immigrants with the North European countries to be the least xenophobic. A salient finding of our analysis is that regardless of the impact of other contextual factors, namely, a country’s macroeconomic conditions, ethnic diversity, cultural origin, and individuals’ attributes, social capital associates with positive attitudes toward all immigrants, independent of their background. Furthermore, social capital moderates the negative effects of perceived threat on people’s opinions about immigrants.

Large international earnings differentials negatively impact human capital investments in migrant-origin countries. We find that three Central Asian migrant-sending countries—the Kyrgyz Republic, the Republic of Tajikistan, and the Republic of Uzbekistan—are facing a forsaken schooling phenomenon. Once completing their compulsory schooling, young people in these countries are forsaking additional schooling because of opportunities to migrate to high-paying low-skilled jobs in the Russian Federation. The countries face a loss in human capital formation.

Hukou registration is an instrument to control nonplanned population and capital movements, which the Chinese Communist Party has been exploiting extensively since the 1950s. It requires that each Chinese citizen be classified as either an agricultural or nonagricultural hukou inheritor and be distinguished by their location with respect to an administrative unit. Hukou distribution used to be entirely determined by birth, but nowadays, Chinese citizens can self-select their hukou status based on their ability that causes selection bias in conventional wage decomposition by hukou types. To avoid this bias, I estimated hukou-based earning discrimination by matching Chinese individuals based on a rich set of individual-, family-, and society-level characteristics. By deploying a recent nationally representative dataset, this paper finds that significant earning discriminations exist against agricultural hukou people. I further investigated the impact of hukou adoption within work ownership, work and employer types, and labor contract conditions. I argue that earning difference by hukou is not due to rural–urban segregations; rather, it is systematic and institutionally enforced. This is because, contrary to self-employment and no labor contract conditions, discrimination exists only when others employ them and where a labor contract condition is enforced. Moreover, they face discrimination only when they work for the Chinese government, not when they work for private firms, and they face higher discrimination in nonagriculture-related professions compared to agriculture-related professions.

The present study contributes to the limited literature on labor mobility in India using the India Human Development Survey panel data for the years 2004–2005 and 2011–2012. We use three different tools, viz., transition matrices, multinomial logistic regression, and wage regressions for this study. The results show significant mobility across sectors in the economy. Mobility patterns among workers are found to differ significantly along the lines of gender, caste, education, wealth, and family background, among others. There is a distress-driven movement of workers. Significant earnings differentials exist across paid work statuses. The paper concludes with some policy suggestions.

Whether and to what extent corruption drives emigration has received growing attention in the literature in recent years, yet the nature of the relationship remains unclear. To test causal claims, we rely on representative global survey data of more than 280,000 respondents across 67 countries from 2010 to 2014. We use two different measures of emigration intentions and individual, as well as country-level measures of corruption, and propose to instrument the endogenous presence of corruption in a country with the prevalence of cashless transactions in the economy to correct for potential estimation bias. We find robust support for the hypothesis that corruption increases emigration intentions across countries. The effect, however, is likely to be underestimated in conventional models that do not account for endogeneity. The results highlight the need to look beyond purely economic, social, security-related, and environmental drivers when assessing the root causes of migration.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), violence should be considered by examining both actual and perceived crime. However, the studies related to violence and internal migration under the Mexican drug war episode focus only on one aspect of violence (perception or actual), so their conclusions rely mostly on limited evidence. This article complements previous work by examining the effects of both perceived and actual violence on interstate migration through estimation of a gravity model along three 5-year periods spanning from 2000 to 2015. Using the methods of generalized maximum entropy (to account for endogeneity) and the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition, the results show that actual violence (measured by homicide rates) does affect migration, but perceived violence explains a greater proportion of higher average migration after 2005. Since this proportion increased after 2010 and actual violence, the results suggest that there was some adaptation to the new levels of violence in the period 2010–2015.

This article sheds new light on the portability of human capital. We estimate the returns to source country experiences, viz., general, occupation-specific, and task-specific experiences, using data from the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), conducted in 2003. While the “returns to general experience” has been discussed in the literature, we are not aware of any previous attempt to estimate the returns to source country occupation-specific and task-specific experiences. Our estimates show that even though the returns to source country general experience is negligible, returns to source country occupation-specific experience is economically and statistically significant. We also find that returns to source country abstract (specifically analytical) task-specific experience is substantial and significant. Our results are robust to inclusion of source country wage, which may reflect unobservable characteristics that influence wages. We explore whether returns to work experience vary by income level in the source country or by an immigrant’s skill level.

International labor mobility is a key factor for a well-functioning labor market. Although educational attainment is known to affect regional labor mobility within a country, evidence of a relationship between schooling and international labor mobility is limited, particularly in developing countries. This study uses the across-cohort variation in the exposure to the 1988 free secondary education reform in the Philippines to examine the impact of years of education on the propensity of working abroad. The results suggest that free secondary education increased the years of education for men. Moreover, the additional years of education reduced the likelihood of working abroad by 3.2% points on average. However, an extra year of female education was not associated with the probability of working abroad. These results indicate that a program for improving access to secondary education may affect international labor mobility for men even after a few decades. It underscores the importance of considering the possible labor market consequences when designing the education reform in developing countries.

The possible nonlinearity of the income elasticity of child labor has been at the center of the debate regarding both its causes and the policy instruments to address it. We contribute to this debate providing theoretical and empirical novel results. From a theoretical point of view, for any given transfer size, there is a critical level of household income below which an increase in income has no impact on child labor and education. We estimate the causal impact of an increase in income on child labor and education exploiting the random allocation of the Child Grant Programme, an unconditional cash transfer (CT), in Lesotho. We show that the poorest households do not increase investment in children’s human capital, while relatively less poor households reduce child labor and increase education. In policy terms, the results indicate that CTs might not be always effective to support the investment in children’s human capital of the poorest households. Beside the integration with other measures, making the amount of transfer depends of the level of deprivation of the household, might improve CT effectiveness.

Despite the bulk of international migrants being youth, little is known about the factors driving young people’s migration behavior at the global level. Using the individual-level survey data from Gallup World Poll across 139 countries over the period 2010–2016, this study contributes to the literature by exploring a wide range of factors potentially shaping young people’s (aged 15–34) desire, and a more concrete plan, to migrate abroad permanently. Results show that factors, such as holding post-secondary education, being unemployed, and working part-time involuntary, are increasing the desire of youth to migrate abroad as well as the probability that they turn this aspiration into a more concrete plan over the following year. Similarly, having negative expectations about the economic outlook, the number of available job opportunities, and the prospects for upward career mobility are found to increase the propensity to migrate abroad, both among unemployed and employed youth. Results also show that material deprivation may represent a significant push factor behind youth migration, although budgetary constraints may prevent youth from transforming their migration desires into actual plans in low-income countries. Moreover, findings suggest that contextual factors, such as discontent with local amenities and national governments, increase the desire of youth to migrate abroad, but they have little or no influence on the probability that these dreams are turned into more concrete plans. Finally, this study shows that while youth’s and adults’ migration propensities are often driven by the same motives, the influence of education and labor market-related factors on migration intentions is considerably stronger among youth than adults.

This article studies whether immigration in voter’s neighborhoods is a driving factor of the rise of Germany’s major right-wing party Alternative fuer Deutschland (AFD) and the decline of Angela Merkel’s center ruling party the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). We use the 2015 refugee crisis as a natural experiment to study the short-run impact of refugee presence on the voting behavior in German municipalities. This is the first study to use a spatial econometric framework combining small-scale immigration data, election data, and a set of socioeconomic factors. Our main finding states that the local immigration boosted AFD votes but did not affect CDU votes directly. Instead, in regions that perceived immigration indirectly, that is in neighboring municipalities, the CDU gained fewer votes.

This paper provides new evidence on the acquisition and persistence of child gender preference among immigrant populations in the United States using Census and American Community Survey data. We first confirm the existing evidence of son preference among immigrant populations from South East Asia that was documented across multiple studies and samples. We then demonstrate several new empirical findings. First, Japanese immigrants exhibit daughter preference. Second, assortative matching between immigrant parents is associated with stronger gender preferences. Third, comparing male and female migrants who marry natives provides suggestive evidence that paternal preferences could be more to blame for son preference than maternal. Fourth, child gender preferences are strongest for migrants who arrive after childhood but do not appear to diminish with the duration of residence in the United States. Finally, while higher-order generations exhibit weaker son preference, there is a high degree of heterogeneity across groups. Most of the second- and higher-order generation immigrants assimilate more rapidly to US norms except Indian immigrant populations, which exhibit strong son preference among higher-order generations.

Little is known about the political consequences of immigration in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this paper, we estimate the effect of exposure to immigration on election outcomes in South Africa. Our analysis is based on municipality panel data and an instrumental variable (IV) strategy exploiting historical migrant settlement patterns. We find that local immigration concentration has a negative impact on the performance of the incumbent African National Congress, whereas support for the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, is found to increase in municipalities with a larger immigrant presence. These effects hold regardless of the skill levels of immigrants in a municipality. In terms of mechanisms, competition over jobs and local public services as well as ethnic diversity and cultural factors influence how immigration affects election outcomes. These findings are robust to a broad range of sensitivity checks. They provide evidence that immigration can be a politically salient issue in migrant-destination Sub-Saharan African countries. They also show that immigration can affect election results even in contexts where there is no single issue anti-migrant party.

We compare the allocation of time of native men and women married to immigrants against their counterparts in all-native couples using the American Time Use Survey for the years 2003–18. We find that when intermarried to a native man, immigrant women pay an assimilation price to the extent that, compared to native women in all-native marriages, they work longer hours at paid work, household chores, or both, while their husbands do no extra work. In some cases, they work for just an extra hour per day. Immigrant men do not pay such a price. Some work 34 min less at household chores than native men in all-native marriages, while the native women who marry immigrant men seem to pay a price related to their situation that would be in an all-native marriage. An explanation based on the operation of competitive marriage markets works for immigrant women, but not for immigrant men. Traditionally, gender-based privileges may allow immigrant men to prevent native women from getting a price for the value that intermarriage generates for their husbands. Such a “male dominance” scenario also helps explain why immigrant men married to native daughters of immigrants from the same region get more benefits from intermarriage than other immigrants.

This article proposes a strategy to identify Syrian refugees in Turkey’s Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS). Even though Turkey’s HLFS contains information on the migrants’ year of arrival to Turkey, it does not provide details on their nationalities. This unfortunate feature mixes Syrian refugees with the standard flow of migration who arrived to Turkey during the Syrian war. I propose to eliminate the standard flow of migrants arrived between 2011 and 2017 by matching them (based on their characteristics) with the migrants arrived in the 2004–2010 period. This method obtains, indirectly, nonstandard migration, i.e., Syrian refugees. The results show that the age distribution of the nonstandard migrants identified matches the age distribution of Syrian refugees as officially released by the Turkish government. At last, I propose a post-stratification adjustment of the survey weights to find the actual geographical distribution of Syrian refugees in Turkey.

This paper does an empirical comparison of time-invariant and time-varying technical inefficiency measures obtained from an econometric estimation of different panel data stochastic production frontier models. It estimates four panel data specifications of frontier models widely used in empirical applications using a panel dataset from the Ethiopian cereal farming sector. The empirical results show that estimates of both the magnitude and the individual farms’ rankings of persistent and transient productive efficiencies differ considerably across models and based on their agro-ecological zones location. The results further show that the cereal growing farms experience much more transient inefficiency as compared to persistent inefficiency.

This article sheds light on the dynamics of the Argentine labor market, using quarterly data from the Argentine Labor Force Survey for the period 2003Q3 to 2020Q1. We examine quarterly transition rates in a four-state model with formal employment, informal employment, unemployment, and nonparticipation. We compute the contribution of each transition rate to fluctuations in unemployment and informality rates. We identify five stylized facts: (i) Nearly 40% of the fluctuations in the unemployment rate involves unemployment ins and outs from/to informal jobs. (ii) More than 40% of the fluctuations in informality rate are driven by the variance of the formalization rate (transition from informal to formal employment). (iii) Non-participation matters for the understanding of unemployment volatility but also for the comprehension of the volatility on informality. (iv) Regarding gender differences: transition involving non-participation matters more in the variance of female unemployment and informality rates than for their male counterparts. (v) The informal sector plays an important role as a stepping stone to formal jobs for both men and women. Our article provides empirical targets to discipline theoretical modeling of labor market dynamics with a sizeable shadow economy.

This article seeks to explain the contradiction between the promises of welfare gains derived from the economic models recommending the removal of immigration restrictions and the realities experienced by countries attempting to apply restrictions to immigration flows. A formal model is built in which the strategic reaction of countries considers not only the benefits derived from migration but also the (economic and non-economic) costs that migration can generate in the host country. Strategic reactions drive what may be called the “paradox of adverse interest”: the fewer potential gains associated with liberalization of migration, the easier it becomes for nations to reach an unrestrictive agreement. The existence of two asymmetries (between the bargaining power of receiving and sending countries, and between the private nature of most of migration’s benefits and the social nature of its main costs) can hinder the agreement when the countries involved exhibit a high wage differential. Results suggest that permissive international agreements on migration are easier to reach in regional contexts, among countries with proximate economic conditions and levels of income.

Are there long-term labor consequences in migrating to the US during a recession? For most immigrants, credibly estimating this effect is difficult because of selective migration. Some immigrants may not move if economic conditions are not favorable. However, identification is possible for refugees as their arrival dates are exogenously determined through the US Refugee Resettlement program. A one percentage point increase in the arrival national unemployment rate reduces refugee wages by 1.98% and employment probability by 1.57 percentage points after 5 years.

This article studies the role of rainfall in determining the education composition of Mexico-US migration. Emphasizing the relationship between rainfall and migration costs, a revised Roy model indicates that rainfall affects selection on education through not only households’ liquidity constraints but also the comparisons between changes in migration costs and wage differentials at different levels of education. With retrospective data on the migration history of male Mexicans, the empirical analysis shows that the inverted U-shaped relationship between migration probabilities and education is less dispersed with a higher vertex when rainfall decreases, suggesting higher migration costs and reinforced self-selection patterns. The impacts of rainfall on selection and education are stronger for the migrant stock than for migration flows. Studying how rainfall influences migrants’ return decisions provides consistent results.