The Feminization of International Migration and its Effects on the Children Left Behind: Evidence from the Philippines

SummaryThis paper explores the effects of a mother’s migration on her children’s well-being. I use children with migrant fathers as the main control group to separately identify the effects coming from remittances from those resulting from parental absence. Exploiting demand shocks as an exogenous source of variation in the probability that the mother migrates, I find suggestive evidence that children of migrant mothers are more likely to lag behind in school compared to children with migrant fathers. Controlling for remittances does not change this result, supporting the hypothesis that a mother’s absence has a stronger detrimental effect than a father’s.