Return Migration and the Survival of Entrepreneurial Activities in Egypt

SummaryThe literature shows that temporary international migrants have a high propensity to opt for an entrepreneurial activity upon return, but the prospects of survival of these activities have not been explored. We address this research question using longitudinal Egyptian data. We find that entrepreneurs’ migration experience significantly improves the chances of survival of their entrepreneurial activities, adopting econometric techniques that control for return migrants’ nonrandom selection in unobservables. We resort to a bivariate probit model and a two-stage residual inclusion estimator, using the rate of population growth and the real oil price as alternative instruments for migration.