Abstract
This article assesses whether international migration from Mexico affects the marital, fertility, schooling, and employment outcomes of the Mexican women who remain behind by exploiting variation over time as well as across Mexican states in the demographic imbalance between men and women. I construct a gauge of the relative supply of men for women of different age groups based on state-level male and female population counts and the empirically observed propensity of men of specific ages to marry women of specific ages. Using Mexican census data from 1960 through 2000, I estimate a series of models in which the dependent variable is the intercensus change in an average outcome for Mexican women measured by state and for specific age groups, and the key explanatory variable is the change in the relative supply of men to women in that state/age group. I find that the declining relative supply of males positively and significantly affects the proportion of women who have never been married as well as the proportion of women who have never had a child. In addition, states experiencing the largest declines in the relative supply of men also experience relatively large increases in female educational attainment and female employment rates. However, I find little evidence that women who do marry match to men who are younger or less educated than themselves.
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Notes
It is conceivable that the indirect effect on the likelihood of marriage of lowering one’s standards may overwhelm the negative direct effect of a decline in male availability operating through the offer arrival rate. This would be the case if a slight drop in standards greatly increases the pool of available men. Of course, this will depend on the actual form of the empirical quality distribution of male suitors. Regardless, these opposing direct and indirect effects suggest that in theory, the effect of relative male scarcity on female marriage probabilities can go in either direction. As I will soon show, however, most studies reviewed in this article have found that mate availability positively covaries with female marriage rates.
The microdata for these tabulations were downloaded from the IPUMS webpage at the University of Minnesota (http://www.ipums.org/).
The natural odds ratio of a male birth is slightly greater than 1, with sex ratios at birth without selective aborting around 1.05 (Almond and Edlund 2008).
The cross-state variation in emigration rates is a fascinating phenomenon in and of itself. A recent thorough empirical analysis of cross-state and cross-cohort migration rates finds that both economic push factors as well as network effects play important roles in determining the cross-state variation in migration rates depicted in Figs. 4 and 5. Hanson and McIntosh (2010) showed that interdecade migration rates from Mexican states between 1960 and 2000 depend positively on the size of particular birth cohorts (consistent with a labor market supply push argument) and negatively on initial per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and growth in per capita GDP. The authors also found substantial heterogeneity in these effects for states that are traditional sending states relative to states with lower historical migration rates. Specifically, they showed that these economic push and pull factors matter more in states with relatively high emigration rates in 1924 and states that are in close proximity to the main railroad passing through the country to the U.S. border (a transportation hub for recruiters of Mexican workers during the pre–World War II period (Cardoso 1980)). Independent of these factors, proximity to the U.S. border is not a particularly strong predictor of emigration rates.
It is also the case that the low sex ratios beyond age 15 observed in Mexico are unique relative to other Latin American countries. In an earlier working paper version of this study, I presented a comparison of Mexican sex ratios by age to those for four other Spanish-speaking Latin American countries. In all comparisons, Mexican sex ratios among those over age 15 are relatively lower, with particularly large differences relative to Panama, Costa Rica, and Venezuela, and more modest differences relative to Colombia. This is not particularly surprising given the relatively low rate of migration from these alternative countries to the United States.
The relevant first-stage models are presented in Table 1.
The results regarding work and school enrollment are certainly consistent with one another. Women are less likely to work when men are relatively abundant and more likely to be enrolled in school, suggesting that the need to work displaced formal education among the women analyzed. However, I also find completed schooling levels to be higher on average when men are relatively scarce. Although these findings regarding school enrollment and educational attainment may seem at odds with one another, it is important to keep in mind that the median woman aged 14–50 in Mexico has nine years of completed schooling, while the comparable median for early years in this analysis period is even lower. Hence, most women in our sample (the minimum age considered is 16) are several years beyond the termination of their formal education. It is therefore possible to see both a response of average years of school completion as well as change in enrollment akin to what is presented here. With poor marriage market prospects, women may increase their educational attainment from primary to middle school levels. At the same time, one can see a reduction in secondary and postsecondary enrollment for some because of the need to work in the formal economy.
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Acknowledgments
This research was sponsored by a research grant from the Fundación BBVA. I gratefully acknowledge this generous support.
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Raphael, S. International Migration, Sex Ratios, and the Socioeconomic Outcomes of Nonmigrant Mexican Women. Demography 50, 971–991 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-012-0189-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-012-0189-6