Abstract
This paper considers the relationship between international migration and gender discrimination through the lens of decision-making power over intrahousehold resource allocation. The endogeneity of migration is addressed with a difference-in-differences style identification strategy and a model with household fixed effects. The results suggest that while a migrant household head is away, a greater share of resources is spent on girls relative to boys and his spouse commands greater decision-making power. Once the head returns home, however, a greater share of resources goes to boys, and there is suggestive evidence of greater authority for the head of household.
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Notes
See Antman (2013) for a review of the literature on this topic.
In the absence of data on expenditures by gender of children, an alternative approach might infer discrimination in child expenditures by linking expenditures on adult goods with household gender composition, as in Deaton (1989).
Chen (2006), Chen (2012), and Chen (2013) provide notable exceptions by suggesting that one spouse’s migration can lead to imperfect monitoring of time allocations in sending households and thus propose a mechanism to identify non-cooperative behavior among spouses in China. Unfortunately, the time allocation data for children available in the Mexican data used here does not allow for similar analysis.
Mexican women overall have slightly lower educational attainment than Mexican men (8.6 versus 9.1 years on average), but education levels are roughly similar for 25–34 year olds (9.4 years for women versus 9.5 for men) (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Economic Development 2014). Note that averages across OECD countries reveal that younger cohorts of women actually display slightly higher levels of educational attainment than men (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Economic Development 2014), suggesting that Mexican women may still make further progress relative to men.
Such concerns would be consistent with evidence from Campos-Vazquez and Lara (2012) showing that return migrants are negatively selected relative to non-migrants in Mexico over this period of time.
For a similar migration experiment, see Gibson et al. (2011) who evaluate the effects of the New Zealand migration lottery program for families of Tongan migrants. While the omnibus results from these experiments are extensive, they do not examine gender discrimination within the immediate family.
Note that with this model, the means of the dependent variable for groups (a), (b), and (c), respectively, are: \(\overline {Y_{a}}=\beta _{0}+\beta _{1}+\beta _{2}\), \(\overline {Y_{b}}=\beta _{0}+\beta _{1}\), \(\overline {Y_{c}} =\beta _{0}\).
The MXFLS is publicly available at http://www.ennvih-mxfls.org/. (Arenas et al. 2009) provide an overview of the migration data available, noting current projects and further research possibilities using the data.
Antman (2011a) shows that the cross-sectional expenditure share results for all households are similar, reflecting the predominance of male headship in Mexico.
Other outcome variables of interest would certainly be time allocation variables, such as the amount of time boys and girls spend working and/or in school to facilitate analyses along the lines of Chen (2012) and Chen (2006). Unfortunately, data limitations prevent me from linking children’s time allocations with migration episodes of the head of household.
While the survey does not distinguish between educational expenditures on adults and children, given that average educational attainment is still fairly low in Mexico (roughly 9 years of schooling, (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Economic Development 2014)), this arguably stems largely from expenditure on children’s education. While the survey contains a separate section indicating educational expenditures on each child, I prefer the measure used here because it is collected in the same manner as the data on clothing expenditures by gender.
All expenditure and income data are deflated using the Mexican CPI and are reported in 2002 Mexican pesos. The CPI data are available from the Banco de Mexico.
The survey collects expenditure information specifically on children’s clothing as distinct from clothing for adults.
An alternative to the expenditure share measure would be the difference in expenditures between boys and girls relative to the sum total expenditure on boys and girls. Using this ratio as the dependent variable yields very similar results, with the main difference being that the range of this variable lies in the [-1,1] range with 0 signifying parity between boys and girls. Thus estimates appear larger in magnitude than the ones presented here, where the range of the dependent variable lies in the [0,1] range and 0.5 signifies parity. Note that this alternative dependent variable would also be undefined whenever total expenditures are zero in this category since they share the same denominator. If one replaces missing values of the alternative dependent variable with zeros, thereby assuming that parity exists whenever no expenditures are made in a given category, the same pattern of results is also obtained but with loss of statistical significance in the total educational expenditure ratio regression in particular. Overall, these robustness checks suggests that neither sample selection nor the specific measure used here is driving the results.
These summary statistics highlight one disadvantage of using the MXFLS data set, namely that the share of migrant households in the data set is very low compared with other surveys that oversample migrant-sending areas, such as the Mexican Migration Project. This may present challenges in the empirical analysis, for instance, the power of hypothesis tests in the fixed effects analysis, because the size of the treated sample is relatively small. As noted above, the advantages of using the MXFLS are that it was designed to be representative of the population and does a relatively good job of limiting attrition over time.
For those concerned that this may reflect the fact that spouses are reporting results while the head is away, Appendix Table 9 shows similar estimates from regressions where the spouse is taken to be the primary respondent.
On average, trips to the USA last 64.86 weeks (s.d. 134.97), i.e., almost one and a quarter years, for heads with any recent migration experience. Since the distribution is so wide, the median may be a better measure of duration, but even that is closer to 7 months, suggesting there are not many trips of very short duration.
Some may question whether children are co-migrating with household heads at the time of the survey, raising concerns that the estimate of the impact of paternal migration on children’s outcomes is really stemming from the effects of sibling’s migration on household expenditure patterns and decision-making. Since there is very little incidence of children migrating in the sample overall, estimating the main results on the sample excluding households with current child migrants produces very similar estimates to those presented here.
Using a log-dependent variable specification yields similar results, but reduces the number of observations.
For brevity, results in the Appendix use the smaller sample.
Thanks to David McKenzie for suggesting this possibility.
Differences in income elasticities across boys’ and girls’ goods could also help drive changes in expenditures as in Rose (1999), although potentially with a more complicated mechanism to fully explain the results presented here.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Terra McKinnish, Richard Akresh, Kate Ambler, Nava Ashraf, Tania Barham, Don Fullerton, Nabanita Datta Gupta, Mary Lopez, Ron Laschever, Darren Lubotsky, Shelly Lundberg, David McKenzie, Robert Pollak, and Elizabeth Powers for their feedback. I also thank three anonymous referees of this Journal, along with the editor, Klaus Zimmermann, for their help and guidance in preparing the final manuscript. Feedback from conference participants at the American Economic Association annual meeting, Northeast Universities Development Consortium Conference, Pacific Conference for Development Economics, Population Association of America annual meeting, Western Economic Association International meeting, and seminar participants at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Massachusetts Boston, and Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is also appreciated. Any errors are my own.
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Responsible Editor: Klaus F. Zimmermann
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Antman, F.M. Gender discrimination in the allocation of migrant household resources. J Popul Econ 28, 565–592 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-015-0548-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-015-0548-x