Essays on the Economics of International Migration and Return.

Abstract

International migration and return are important channels through which individuals from migrant-sending countries stand to benefit from the world economy. This dissertation examines questions concerning the economics of why people go abroad and why they might return, and then looks at the consequences of such decisions.

The first chapter investigates whether domestic employers value the foreign work experience of migrants when they return home from abroad. I conduct an audit study in the Philippines, sending 8,000 fictitious resumes in response to job postings across multiple occupations. Resumes are randomly assigned varying lengths of foreign work experience, among other things. Workers with foreign experience receive 12 percent fewer callbacks than non-migrants, with callback rates even lower for those who have spent a longer time abroad. I find that location-specific human capital is important to employers, and the value of this human capital deteriorates as a worker spends time away from the domestic economy.

The second chapter discusses why migrants might decide to return to their home countries in the first place. I utilize exogenous exchange rate shocks arising from the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis to distinguish between return motivations of Australian immigrants. A depreciation in a migrant’s home country currency leads to a reduced likelihood of return. The results favor a life-cycle explanation for migrant behavior and reject the theory that migrants are target earners who seek to invest upon return.

The third chapter, joint with Caroline Theoharides, considers “brain drain”, which is a chief concern for many developing countries. The “brain drain” view holds that migration is usually responsible for the scarcity of healthcare workers in a country, contributing to poor health outcomes. This chapter challenges prevailing wisdom by demonstrating how international migration may, in fact, lead to human capital formation. We focus on nurse migration from the Philippines. Using microdata on migrant departures, we find that the large nurse outmigration during the 2000s led to large subsequent increases in enrollments for nursing degrees in many provinces. The increase in human capital was large enough that, there was no reduction but an increased supply of nurses remaining in the country.