Schooling choices and parental migration. Evidence from Mexico
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Schooling choices and parental migration. Evidence from Mexico Simona Fiore
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Received: 3 April 2019 / Accepted: 6 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This paper investigates the role of parental absence due to migration on education and labor market outcomes of children left behind in Mexico. I look at the effect of absence at different moments of a child’s educational career and estimate the impact of the timing of a parent’s migration in order to understand how mother’s and father’s inputs affect children’s outcomes at different ages. Results show that a mother’s migration when the child has to start a new level of schooling, i.e. when investment decisions on children’s education must be made, has a significant negative impact on children’s schooling. Also the duration of mother’s absence plays a role: the longer the mother’s migration, the less children are educated. I find that, when the mother migrates, daughters substitute the mother’s work in or outside the household, depending on their age. Keywords International migration Education Left behind Intra-household allocations Mexico ●
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JEL classification F22 J16 I25 D13 ●
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1 Introduction Research in economics has extensively emphasized the critical role of the family in shaping children’s cognitive and noncognitive abilities (McLanahan and Sandefur 2009; Heckman 2006, e.g.). Early family environment can influence children’s outcomes, including educational patterns, especially during primary education, when
Supplementary information The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-02009517-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Simona Fiore simona.fi[email protected] 1
Department of Economics and Statistics Cognetti de Martiis, University of Turin, Lungo Dora Siena 100 A, 10153 Torino, Italy
S. Fiore
parents take most of the decisions concerning investments in children’s human capital. The worldwide increase in the number of children growing up in non-intact families raises new concerns on the impact of families’ structure on investment in children’s education. In a context with low divorce and non-marital fertility rate, migration is among the most important determinants of family’s dissolution, with children living separated from one parent, even in cases of an unbroken wife–husband relationship. Indeed, migration during the era of the Great Emigration1 had been a significant factor contributing to the changes in the structure of Mexican families (Nobles 2013). The effects of family’s dissolution due to migration crucially depends on the gender of the migrant parent: gender is a significant determinant of many decisions on investments in children’s wellbeing, including inputs into education acquisition. Studies on the determinants of children’s education suggest that a mother’s human capital is more closely related to children’s educational attainment than the father’s and that maternal childcare time significantly increas
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