Female migration in Brazil: The role of marital status in the migration decisions and wages of women.

Abstract

Women have been largely ignored in the economics literature devoted to modeling internal labor migration in developing countries. This dissertation investigates female migrants in Brazil moving from the Northeast to the Extended-Southeast region in 1976, in an attempt to improve our understanding of the role played by marital status in the migration decisions and wages of women. The migration decision of women is modeled both as a standard individual income maximization problem and as part of a household maximization problem. Estimation of the resulting migration models is based first on the sub-sample of women who have a non-zero wage, and then is corrected for selection bias due to the censored sample. We find that while own income differentials are a significant predictor of migration behavior of never-married men and women and married men, husband's income is a much better predictor than own income of a married woman's migration behavior. The second part of the dissertation attempts to predict the consequences for womens' wages of the existence of tied movers and tied stayers in the same two regions of Brazil. A comparison of migrant wages with and without correction for migration selection does result in a decrease in the positive impact of married status on wages, as hypothesized, but the expected opposite result for non-migrant wages was not found.