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Bilateral labor agreements (BLAs) are preferred policy models for regulating migration by many governments around the world. The Philippines has been a leader in both agreement conclusion and exporting labor. A recent Congressional evocation is pushing bureaucrats and academics alike to investigate this policy strategy for outcomes and effectiveness. The following analysis answers the question “Do BLAs affect the migration outflows of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs)?” using a plausibly exogenous variation to isolate a causal effect. I test for effects of BLAs using two instrumental variables (IVs), such as Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) and Formal Alliances, and an original dataset of land-based and sea-based Filipino BLAs and migrant stock in 213 unique areas from 1960 to 2018. I do not find any empirical evidence that these treaties drive migration. However, BLAs have statistically significant effects on gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and exports, suggesting other important channels through which these agreements affect economic outcomes. These null results are critically important for policymakers and diplomats because the resources spent on negotiation are wasted if the primary goal is to increase migration.

We study the consequences of international migration on labor market outcomes in a developing country. Specifically, we look at the case of Mexico, where large-scale international migration has led to significant declines in the male/female ratio. We explore whether this results in Mexican women entering high-skilled and better paying jobs over time. This question is relevant since there has been an increase in women's education and labor force participation across the developing world, but less evidence of improvements in the gender wage gap. Using an instrumental variables strategy that relies on historical migration patterns, we find that when there are relatively fewer men, women are more likely to work, have high-skilled jobs, and some earn higher wages. These results are robust to the inclusion of state, age group, and year fixed effects, and to different measures of migration and data sources. We explore investments in human capital as a key mechanism. We find that the gains in schooling are concentrated among women with the same average level of education of the men who migrate. From an aggregate perspective, these improvements in job type and wages are important given that higher female income may benefit the status, education, and health of both women and children, which in turn increases a country's development and growth. Our findings are among the few that show some movement toward improvements in the gender wage gap in a developing country setting.

I examine long-term employment and wage consequences for refugees who immigrate to the United States under different business cycle conditions. It is difficult to causally identify the relationship between initial economic conditions and subsequent outcomes for most immigrants because they can choose when and where they immigrate. However, refugees offer a unique opportunity to empirically measure these outcomes because their dates of arrival and states of placement are exogenously chosen through the US Refugee Resettlement Program. For every one percentage point increase in the national unemployment rate at arrival, refugees on average experience a 2.99% reduction in wages five years later and a 1.8 percentage point reduction in employment four years later. Estimates using state unemployment rate at arrival show less persistence suggesting mobility or differential economic improvement across states may be important in mitigating these effects. I also divide the sample across gender and educational attainment. I find no evidence of wage scarring for uneducated males but observe a 4.85% reduction in wages five years later for high school-educated males and a 5.29% reduction in wages four years later for college-educated.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

We provide quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of alcohol regulation on alcohol consumption and associated public health outcomes using detailed individual level and aggregate data from India, where state-level laws regulating the minimum legal drinking age generate substantial variation in the availability of commercially produced alcohol across people of different ages. We find that despite significant law evasion, men who are legally allowed to drink are substantially more likely to consume alcohol. Further, men who are legally allowed to drink are significantly more likely to commit violence against their partners, suggesting a causal channel between alcohol consumption and domestic violence. These results are robust to the exclusion of states with prohibition, implying that they are driven by differences in MLDA. We also examine the effects of alcohol regulation on other public health outcomes. Consistent with the existing literature, we find evidence that smoking and drinking are complements. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that stricter alcohol control is associated with lower rates of motor vehicle accidents and crimes against women, but not other forms of crime.

We explore patterns of successive migration within rural households in Ghana and the impact that these successive migrants have on household welfare outcomes. Specifically, we use a household panel survey collected in 2013 and 2015. We exploit the panel nature of the data and a weighting method to overcome sources of bias. Welfare is measured with an index of housing quality. We find that successive migrants face lower migration costs, and few of them remit. We find no effect of sending a new migrant on the housing quality index. We conclude that the different nature of migration of successive migrants implies neither an economic gain for the household nor a loss. The reason is that the successive migration becomes less costly for migrants from households with prior migration experience, but at the same time, these migrants remit less or not at all compared to earlier waves of migrants.

In recent decades, the USA has admitted a large number of foreign-born students into its educational system, raising concerns that the presence of foreign-born students would adversely impact the educational achievement of US-born students and incentivize them to move to private schools where there are fewer immigrant students. In this article, I attempt to extend our understanding of how stricter immigration policy, such as the Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA), may affect college enrollment and the public-private school choice of US-born individuals. The analysis shows that the share of immigrant students across Arizona’s educational system declined significantly by the passage of LAWA: the share of foreign-born students in elementary and secondary schools in Arizona would be higher by approximately 1.1 and 1.7 percentage points, respectively, in the absence of LAWA. Similarly, the share of foreign-born college students in Arizona declined significantly by 1.5 percentage points due to LAWA. Despite this decline, there is no evidence that LAWA has statistically significantly affected natives’ college enrollment rates. However, there is evidence that LAWA reduces the proportion of US-born white non-Hispanic student in higher education attending private colleges.

Having a family member migrant reduces not only the labor force participation but also the job satisfaction of those left behind. Migrants’ relatives build their expectations on earnings from migration through received information on the wage distribution in the destination country either from the size of remittances or directly from migrants. If their expected earnings from migration greatly exceed their current wages in the source country, migrant relatives become more dissatisfied with their jobs. Using a simple economic model of job satisfaction and applying both parametric and semiparametric estimations to Tajikistan’s data, as well as with controlling for an endogeneity issue with the variable of interest, we estimate the significantly positive effect of the difference of the expected outside country earnings and current earnings of migrants’ relatives on their job dissatisfaction. A larger gap between what an individual could earn in the migration destination country and what she receives now at her current job in the source country makes that individual unhappier.

This paper studies the role of within- and between-firm effects on the gender wage gap (GWG). Using linked employer–employee data for Turkey for 2006 and 2014, we show that the wage gap among comparable men and women is much wider within establishments than between establishments. Our distributional analysis shows a more pronounced gap among highly paid workers, consistent with the presence of a glass-ceiling effect. This effect, however, is more apparent within establishments than between establishments, and it is the former that drives the economy-wide glass ceiling that women face. We also find that between 2006 and 2014, the GWG in Turkey widened at all points in the wage distribution, and that this widening was more pronounced within establishments than between establishments.

The frequency of labor inspections in Brazil increased in the late 1990s. In the years that followed, between 2003 and 2007, formal employment expanded significantly in the country. This paper examines whether these city-level changes in labor inspections could be a significant factor contributing to the increase in the number of formal labor contracts at the city level. We exploit unique administrative data on formal employment on different indicators for job and worker flows—including job creation, destruction, reallocation, accessions, and separations—between 1996 and 2006, and on the intensity of labor inspections, both at the city level. The results show that increases in the enforcement of labor market regulations at the subnational level led to an increase in gross and net formal job creation rates and accession rates in a period when the Brazilian GDP and formal employment were growing and informality rates were declining. In contrast, increases in enforcement of regulations are not significantly correlated with changes in the rate of job destruction. This finding is robust to different specifications and is consistent with a model where formal jobs become more attractive to workers when enforcement of different types of labor regulations increases.JEL ClassificationJ21, J63, E24, H80, C23

Limited language proficiency among migrants has been shown to limit migrants from various aspects of everyday life, from the labor market to government services. In the USA, language access laws have been enacted to help provide Limited English Proficient (LEP) individuals and households access to public benefits. The most extensive efforts in language access are in health care, with numerous states requiring Medicaid agencies to provide interpreters or translated documents. In this paper, I take advantage of heterogeneity in state-level language access laws to examine whether these efforts do indeed increase Medicaid take-up rates. I find that language access improves Medicaid take-up rates among LEP migrants without crowding out private health insurance; in fact, private health insurance coverage improves with the enactment of language access laws. There is some variation in efficacy across states, with some evidence that California and New York are the main drivers of the increased take-up rates. Lastly, I find that even though many of the language access laws primarily target Spanish speakers, the laws might not be as helpful to Spanish-speaking migrants.

There is potential for measurement problems in both retrospective and panel microdata. In this paper, we compare results on basic indicators related to labor markets and their dynamics from retrospective and panel survey data in Egypt, in order to determine the conditions under which results are similar or different. Specifically, we (1) assess the consistency of reporting of time-invariant characteristics in different waves of the panel, (2) compare the retrospective and panel data results on past labor market statuses, (3) assess the consistency of estimates of labor market transition rates across two specific dates by comparing panel and retrospective data, (4) assess the consistency of estimates of the level and trends of annual labor market transition rates across retrospective data from different waves of the survey, and (5) assess whether retrospective data can provide accurate trends of labor market aggregates, such as unemployment rates. We find that it is possible to garner useful information on labor market dynamics from retrospective data, but one must be cautious about which information to trust and at what level of detail. We conclude with a discussion of implications for future research as well as future survey design.JEL Classification:C83, C81, J01, J62, J64

Youth unemployment and underemployment are serious concerns in sub-Saharan Africa, especially given the region’s young population. The barriers young people face stem both from skills deficiencies and from weak fundamentals that constrain job creation more generally in the region. Employment interventions can mitigate some of these barriers. However, our stocktaking of these interventions suggests that existing programs are disproportionately focused on the formal wage sector and do not adequately reflect the reality that most young people work in agriculture, household enterprises, and self-employment and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Finally, better data and evaluation are needed for more effective interventions.

This paper investigates the effects of person-, firm-, industry-, and business strategy-specific characteristics on the survival of youth-owned urban micro and small enterprises in Ethiopia. It employs nonparametric and semi-parametric methodologies using a retrospective data. The hazard rate reaches the highest point at business 2 years for micro enterprises and 4 years for small enterprises. Owner-, firm-, and industry-specific characteristics are important factors for micro and small enterprises’ (MSEs’) survival. Marketing and financial management strategies are playing a crucial role on extending MSEs’ survival duration. The study implies there should be more effective and longer period of support for micro than small enterprises.

We exploit the size of the 2010 Ecuadorian Census to estimate the effect of remittances on secondary school enrollment across four key dimensions: gender, household wealth, rural vs. urban, and family migration status. Using a bivariate probit model that accounts for both endogeneity and non-linearity issues, we find both positive and negative effects of remittances on the likelihood of schooling. The strongest positive effects are for poorer, urban males, while the negative effects are for rural females. For children in wealthier households, the effects of remittances are either negative or non-significant. This suggests that the positive income effects of remittances may be offset by the negative effects of a missing parent due to migration, more visible in wealthier families where financial constraints may not be as binding. We find further support for this by estimating the effects of remittances conditional on migration status. Our results show positive effects on schooling for non-migrant households that receive remittances and no effects for children living in households where at least one parent has migrated. The sharp contrasts within and across groups, while using the same data and econometric specifications, help explain the lack of consensus in the literature.

This paper documents the changing structure of wages in India over the post-reform era, the roughly two-decade period since 1993. To investigate the factors underlying these changes, a supply-demand framework is applied at the level of the Indian state. While real wages have risen across India over the past two decades, the increase has been greater in rural areas and, especially, for unskilled workers. The analysis finds that, in rural areas, the changing wage structure has been driven largely by relative supply factors, such as increased overall education levels and falling female labor force participation. Relative wage changes between rural and urban areas have been driven largely by shifts in employment, notably into unskilled-intensive sectors like construction.JEL Classification:J21, J23, J24, J31

Following publication of the original article (Gustafsson et al., 2017), the authors reported a list of errors.

The effect of violence on people’s residential choice remains a debated topic in the literature on crime and conflict. We examine the case of the drug war in Mexico, which dramatically increased the number of homicides since late 2006. Using data from the Mexican Census and labor force surveys, we estimate the impact of violence on migration at the municipal and state levels. To account for the endogeneity of violence, we use kilometers of federal highways interacted with cocaine supply shocks from Colombia as an instrument for the annual homicide rate. We argue that highways are good measures of pre-existing drug distribution networks, and the interaction with supply shocks arising in Colombia captures the time-variant nature of the value of these routes. After controlling for observed and unobserved area level heterogeneity, we find little evidence that increases in homicides have led to out-migration, at the domestic level. We also find little evidence of international migration at the municipal level, but some evidence of it at the state level. Our results show a muted migration response that is incompatible with a story of wide-scale displacement from the violence.JEL Classification O12, K42, O54, J11

This study specifies and applies a gravity model to provide empirical evidence on determinants of emigration from Turkey to 31 destination European countries over the period between 1960 and 2013. Results under alternative estimation strategies show that economic, demographic and cultural factors have significant influence on migration decision to the destination countries. The model has explanatory power and is useful for testing the given hypothesized determinants of migration from Turkey to 31 European countries from perspective of the country of origin.JEL ClassificationF22, F14, C33

This is the first study exploring the causal effect of education on teenage fertility in Argentina. We exploit an exogenous variation in education from the staggered implementation of the 1993 reform, which increased compulsory schooling from 7 to 10 years. We find a negative overall impact of education on teenage fertility rates, which operates through two complementing channels: a human capital effect (one additional year of schooling causes a decline of 30 births per 1000 girls) and a weaker ‘incapacitation’ effect (a rise of one percentage point in enrollment rate reduces 3 births per 1000 girls)., Facultad de Ciencias Económicas, Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales

This paper investigates the migration behavior of rural-urban migrants within Vietnam. It focuses on the length and intensity of migration and its respective determinants. The analysis uses panel data of 2200 rural households and data from a migrant tracking survey of 299 migrants from Vietnam. The findings show that migrants coming from rural households that faced a higher number of idiosyncratic shocks increase their stays in the cities, while those from households that experienced covariate shocks such as floods, droughts, or economic shocks shorten the lengths of their stays in the cities. An increased length of migration is also observed among migrants and households with higher human capital. Furthermore, a decreased income gap between rural and urban provinces due to the higher economic growth in the cities increases the duration of migration. With respect to the migration intensity, migrants intend to return sooner when they face shocks in the cities and the living conditions at their original places improve. JEL Classification: D13, J28, J61, O15, O18, Z13

The original version of this article (Egger and Litchfield 2019) has been published with an incorrect copyright holder and license text. The original publication of this article has been updated to correct this.