Remittances and the Brain Drain: Evidence from Microdata for Sub-Saharan Africa

Julia Bredtmann, Fernanda Martínez Flores and Sebastian Otten

No 1627, RF Berlin - CReAM Discussion Paper Series from Rockwool Foundation Berlin (RF Berlin) - Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM)

Abstract: Research on the relationship between high-skilled migration and remittances has been limited by the lack of suitable microdata. We create a unique cross-country dataset by combining household surveys from five Sub-Saharan African countries that enables us to analyze the effect of migrants’ education on their remittance behavior. Having comprehensive information on both ends of the migrant-origin household relationship and employing household fixed effects specifications that only use within-household variation for identification allows us to address the problem of unobserved heterogeneity across migrants’ origin households. Our results reveal that migrants’ education has no significant impact on the likelihood of sending remittances. Conditional on sending remittances, however, high-skilled migrants send significantly higher amounts of money to their households left behind. This effect holds for the sub-groups of internal migrants and migrants in non-OECD countries, while it vanishes for migrants in OECD destination countries once characteristics of the origin household are controlled for.

Keywords: migration; remittances; skill level; brain drain; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 F24 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-int and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cream-migration.org/publ_uploads/CDP_27_16.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Remittances and the Brain Drain: Evidence from Microdata for Sub-Saharan Africa (2019)
Journal Article: Remittances and the Brain Drain: Evidence from Microdata for Sub-Saharan Africa (2018)
Working Paper: Remittances and the Brain Drain: Evidence from Microdata for Sub-Saharan Africa (2016)
Working Paper: Remittances and the brain drain: Evidence from microdata for Sub-Saharan Africa (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:crm:wpaper:1627

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RF Berlin - CReAM Discussion Paper Series from Rockwool Foundation Berlin (RF Berlin) - Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CReAM Administrator () and Matthew Nibloe ().