Effects of Parental Migration on Education and Personality: Evidence from Indonesia
In developing countries, migration can be an important method for many families and households to produce additional income via remittances in order to meet their needs or invest in their children. However, migration is a dynamic process and the absence of a parent can have negative effects on those children left behind. This paper explores how parental migration is associated with their children’s years of education completed and how these associations are heterogenous by family compositions in Indonesia. I use a longitudinal dataset which allows for parents’ migrations to be attributed throughout an individual’s childhood to measure the cumulative impact. There is suggestive evidence that the effect varies by which parent migrates, but results are not significant throughout. However, for certain cases, migration can help overcome detrimental circumstances, such as the lack of a father in the household, to increase education. I also explore how parental migration correlates with personality. There is suggestive evidence that a parent migrating can produce effects along certain personality aspects. In addition, given that disentangling migration from other endogenous variables remains a constant difficulty, this paper attempts to measure a lower bound on the coefficient bias and the importance of unobserved characteristics in order to probe the estimates’ robustness.
Education, Migration, Parental Migration, Personality, Behavioral Economics, Educational Sociology, Personality and Social Contexts
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