The Children Are All Right: Revisiting the Impact of Parental Migration in the Philippines
Monday, April 30, 201812:00 PM - 1:30 PM (Pacific)
Encina Hall, Third Floor, Central, C330
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Using previously unexamined nationally representative data from the Philippines, this study employs detailed measures of children’s welfare and addresses biases related to endogeneity of parental migration to examine the wellbeing of left-behind children. The results are robust across several econometric methods (treatment effects, biprobit, PSM, PSM-IV). They suggest that migrants’ children have better educational outcomes and are less likely to work, but are more likely to be physically sick, which cognitive stress theory would attribute to parental migration as a stressor. Still, the positive impacts of parental migration, attributable to income effect, outweigh the negative effects attributable to parental absence. The results also show heterogeneity in the impacts of parental migration conditional on children’s gender.