Research

Job Market Paper

"Parental Rural-Urban Migration and Child Education"

Abstract: Household migration involves both parental and child location choices, which raises more issues of selectivity and endogeneity. Sending children to different locations determines the quality of schooling and parent-child separation. A nested discrete choice model is developed that incorporates the expected returns to children's education as part of the parents' migration decision. Estimation results using panel data of Chinese rural households show that the impact of parental internal migration on children's education differs by children's stage of education. Policies on the destination side of migration have the greatest impact on households with primary school-age children, while parents of middle school-age children are the group most motivated to migrate for better educational opportunities for their children. And high school-age children are the group most sensitive to budget constraints, with parents having the lowest substitution between education and migration resources within the household budget. The results also suggest that migration frictions are not effective in controlling rural-urban migration flows as intended.

Working Paper

"Migration Outcome Gap: The Cost of Leaving Children Behind"

Abstract: Parents invest money and attention in their children, and migrant parents may trade one for the other. In the context of rural-urban migration, parental migration improves household economic conditions, which leads to greater investment in children, but if the child is left behind by the migrant parents, the lack of parental attention and the shortage of agricultural labor will cause the child to drop out of school more often and earlier; while if the child is brought to the destination by the migrant parents, the limited access to public schools at the destination will also cause the child's enrollment to be low. I focus on internal migration in China, where there are institutional mobility restrictions that limit migrants' ability to access social services at the destination and thus pose the problem of multiple selectivity. Using a simultaneous equations model to deal with endogeneity, the results highlight the motive of households to migrate for better educational opportunities for children and predict a gain from rural-urban migration in children's educational outcomes. And a significant part of the income gains from migration is invested in the child's human capital accumulation. The results also suggest that institutional restrictions on mobility in China don't prevent migrant families from moving to urban areas, but only limit their access to local social services and lead to a loss of welfare.

Publication

"Forecasting Bilateral Refugee Flows with High-dimensional Data and Machine Learning Techniques" (with Konstantin Boss and Tobias Heidland and Andre Groeger and Finja Krüger). [Ungated Link]
Journal of Economic Geography, August 2024: lbae023.

Abstract: We develop monthly asylum seeker flow forecasting models for 157 origin countries to the EU27, using machine learning and high-dimensional data, including digital trace data from Google Trends. Comparing different models and forecasting horizons and validating out-of-sample, we find that an ensemble forecast combining Random Forest and Extreme Gradient Boosting algorithms outperforms the random walk over horizons between 3 and 12 months. For large corridors, this holds in a parsimonious model exclusively based on Google Trends variables, which has the advantage of near real-time availability. We provide practical recommendations how our approach can enable ahead-of-period asylum seeker flow forecasting applications.

Work-in-Progress

“Family Migration and the Intergenerational Contract between Informal Elderly Care and Child Care”

Abstract: Internal rural-urban labor migration has large welfare effects on the families of migrant workers, especially their parents and their children, and on intrahousehold intergenerational trade-offs. Children left behind are most likely to be cared for by grandparents, and preschool children are more likely to be brought to the destination by the migrant parents if the grandparents also move. Given that informal elder care is still the most common form of elder care in developing countries, grandparents are willing to care for grandchildren at a relatively young age in exchange for a higher chance of receiving elder care at an older age when they have more care needs. I develop a structural model of the intergenerational contract between informal elder care and child care and estimate the impact of migration on household welfare.