Working Paper No. 08-03

The Intergenerational Effects of Paternal Migration on Schooling and Work: What Can We Learn from Children’s Time Allocations?

Francisca Antman

July 2007

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the e¤ect of a father’s current migration to the U.S. on his children’s schooling and work outcomes in Mexico. While remittances from abroad could relax the household budget constraint and allow the child to obtain more schooling and work less they may be out-weighed by the deleterious effects due to the father’s absence from the home and the possibility that a father’s migration experience could lead to an underinvestment in Mexican education that is not well-rewarded in the U.S. To get around the endogeneity of paternal migration, I use individual fixed effects and IV estimation where the instrumental variables are based on past U.S. economic statistics. Overall, the fixed effects results suggest girls, 12-15, increase study participation in response to a father’s U.S. migration and decrease their domestic work participation. Similarly, the IV results point to a positive effect of migration on study hours and participation that is robust to the weakness of the instrumental variables used in the analysis. This set of results is consistent with a story in which paternal migration to the U.S. mainly affects child outcomes by increasing financial resources and relaxing the household budget constraint.

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