Disentangling fathers’ absences from household remittances in international migration: The case of educational attainment in Guatemala

Abstract

Estimating the effects of international migration on left-behind children’s educational attainment is complicated by the potential offsetting effects of fathers’ absences and household remittances. Most research has not separated these aspects of international migration on children’s human capital outcomes. We address this deficiency by using instrumental variables to isolate the effects of fathers’ international migration absences from international household remittances on student enrollment and grade progression in Guatemala. Results indicate that fathers’ absences and household international remittances are negatively related to enrollment, providing evidence for a culture of migration effect. For students who remain in school, household international remittances neutralize the harmful influence of fathers’ absences on grade progression.

Seasonal Migration and Education of Children Left Behind: Evidence from Armenia

“…They find that parental migration negatively affects the school attendance of 12 to 18-year-old boys and 16 to 18-year-old girls. This is in line with the findings of Davis and Brazil (2016), who use historic community migration networks as an instrument for the seasonal migration decision, and the US receiving community wages (measured as average wage for low skilled workers in 25 large US cities) as an instrument for remittances. They conclude that the absence of a parent has a negative impact on school enrollment.…”

“…Some papers (e.g. McKenzie & Rapoport, 2011;Davis & Brazil, 2016;Antman, 2011) find that seasonal migration negatively influences the educational performance of CLB, while other studies (Theoharides, 2018;Bai et al, 2018) find a positive effect. Possible reasons for the mixed evidence may be differences between countries where the studies are conducted 1 , identification strategies, and alternative measures of child performance used by researchers.…”

“…First, seasonal migration decisions of parents are potentially endogenous with respect to the performance of their children. To overcome this issue, most existing studies use instrument variables (IVs), such as historical migration networks (McKenzie & Rapoport, 2011;Davis & Brazil, 2016), the age of the head of the household (Bucheli, Bohara, & Fontenla, 2018), a sibling's age at the time of parental migration (Antman, 2012), and demand shocks in destination countries (Antman, 2011;Cortes, 2015;Theoharides, 2018). The advantages and disadvantages of these instruments are extensively discussed in the literature, for instance, see Antman (2012) for an excellent review.…”

“…The idea behind this approach is that the age of the household head is correlated with the decision (and sending remittances), and those studies assume that parental age does not directly affect the educational attainment of children. However, the age of the household head may directly affect the educational attainment of CLB children as it is correlated with the age of a child and number of siblings.Alternatively, McKenzie and Rapoport (2011) andDavis and Brazil (2016) use state (region)-level historical migration rates as an instrument. The idea behind this approach is that historical migration stocks reduce the price of migration for current migrants, and if the time period between the past migration and the observation period is large enough, historical migration will not affect the education of children directly.Though the method has clear advantages over other methods used in the literature, it is not appropriate for studies of many developing countries due to the absence of historical migration data or to small numbers of regions.…”

Joint parental school choice: Exploring the influence of individual preferences of husbands and wives

“…Differences in parenting styles or preferences between mothers and fathers have already been found to influence children's sports achievements (Amorose et al, 2016), healthy versus non-healthy diets (Fielding-Singh, 2017;Marette et al, 2016), and most notably, on educational attainment (Blau and Hameiri, 2012;Davis and Brazil, 2016;Marissa and Ishaaq, 2012;McBride et al, 2005). Furthermore, mother's and father's schooling has also been found to affect their children's schooling in different ways.…”