Esteban J. Quiñones is wrapping up his Ph.D. in Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and will be joining Mathematica Policy Research later this summer.
This third and final recap of the 2019 Midwest International Economics Development Conference summarizes sessions under the cash transfers, migration, and environment and migration themes.
One striking feature of these papers is just how interrelated they are when it comes to the core issues that they examine. These links are not ultimately surprising, however, when we consider the tradeoffs inherent to investment and mitigation decisions, particularly in contexts with incomplete markets.
Cash transfers and migration (in Asia)
For instance, three papers consider the relationship between cash transfers and migration in Asia.
Gharad Bryan, Shyamal B. Chowdury, Melanie Morten, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and Joeri Smits find that a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program increases both migration and seasonal incomes of migrants in West Timor, but there are no impacts on total income or food security and there is considerable heterogeneity in these responses. This study highlights the tradeoff between seasonal migration and investments in non-farm capital.
Bolun Li’s research provides evidence that both migration restrictions and conditional cash transfers can have positive effects on children’s cognitive achievement in rural China. However, migration also has a negative effect on the cognitive scores of children that are left behind. This research points to the potential for negative impacts of migration on human capital formation, and need for policies to mitigate inhibited cognitive development among children of migrants.
The third paper on this topic by Joyce Chen and Jon Einar Flatnes shows that farmers in Bangladesh exposed to the 1998 flood who did not have access to credit were more likely to temporarily migrate, but not permanently. Access to credit fully mitigates the temporary response. Relieving credit constraints can hence mitigate climate shocks and, in so doing, diminish environmentally motivated temporary migration.
Human capital outcomes in relation to cash transfers and migration
There were four papers presented, in addition to Li’s (see above), that explore the relationship between human capital outcomes (broadly defined in terms of education, cognition, and literacy) and cash transfers or migration.
Dylan Fitz and Riley League provide evidence that positive rainfall deviations increase the likelihood of paid labor and reduce schooling in Brazil, but Bolsa Familia mitigates some of these effects, particularly in rural areas and for younger girls – which demonstrates the potentially protective role of CCTs on school attendance.
Jose Casco finds that participation in a CCT increases women’s freedom to make decisions and the allocation of time into home production (investments in children that involve spending more time with them) in Ecuador. These time allocation outcomes are however also dependent on relative wages, preferences over child quality, and conditionalities. This research highlights the different mechanisms though which CCTs may alter intra-household time allocation (-Casco’s research was also mentioned in a recent blog about the economics of gender).
Tobias Futze shows that CCT program graduation (moving above the program’s poverty threshold) reduces school attendance at lower secondary school (grades 7-9) in urban areas and at the upper secondary level (grades 10-12) in rural areas in Mexico. This finding that program graduation can be detrimental to human capital accumulation suggests that higher graduation thresholds may be preferable.
William J. Collins and Ariell Zimran find that children of ‘famine Irish’ migrants in the United States of America are worse off in terms of literacy. While these initial disadvantages do result in lower occupational outcomes among mid-nineteenth century immigrants, the occupational attainment gap among sons of the famine-era Irish immigrants is considerably smaller than that of their fathers. This research highlights the persistence of disadvantages associated with the Irish potato famine and the substantial upward mobility ‘famine Irish’ descendants over a 30-year period.
Environmental stimuli and migration outcomes
Three presented papers, in addition to those discussed above by Chen and Flatness and Fitz and League, examine the relationship between environmental stimuli and migration outcomes.
Valerie Mueller, Glenn Sheriff, Xiaoya Dou, and Clark Gray find that out-migration is nonlinear and concave in temperature and rainfall in urban areas of Eastern Africa (Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda); a one standard deviation increase in temperature leads to an 11 percent decline in out-migration, while a one standard deviation increase in rainfall leads to a 12 percent decline in out-migration. Urban out-migration appears to decline due to fewer opportunities in rural areas, not increased opportunities in urban areas. This research highlights the role of climatic conditions as a migration pull factor as well as the limitations of temporary migration as an adaptation strategy.
Brian Feld and Marieke Kleemans provide evidence of a causal relationship between migration and crime rates in Indonesia using weather shocks in origin areas as an instrument. However, the direction of this relationship remains unclear, as individual-level analysis suggests that in-migration is associated with higher reported property crime rates while an alternative household-level dataset suggests that crime rates go down, especially among migrant populations. Although the authors recognize that more work is required to parse this discrepancy, their work all the same points to a causal relationship between environmental push factors (rainfall), migration, and changes in reported crime rates.
Finally, in my paper I find that individuals mitigate against the increased probability of destabilizing climate events in an anticipatory manner through domestic migration in Mexico. This entails learning from others about climate risk and increasing domestic migration by 2.6 and 4 percentage points. This study highlights the extent to which individuals engage in social learning and adapt to climate change in anticipation of extreme shocks with domestic migration, as opposed to waiting until after environmental shocks occur. A more detailed blog about this study is available here.
Parting Thoughts
While studying the relationship between core development topics may be unconventional, these papers demonstrate that cross-topic research holds the potential to provide insights about development by deepening our knowledge about an important topic while also extending our understanding of its relation to other core development topics. In fact, many of these topics are fundamentally linked, as they each reflect outside options, opportunity costs, and tradeoffs that are inherent to individual and household-level decision-making processes. The next time you are brainstorming research questions, you may want to take a step back and mull ideas that expand our understanding of the inherent interrelations within development.
