Migration, Risk and the Intra-Household Allocation of Labor in El Salvador

Timothy J. Halliday

No 200719, Working Papers from University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Economics

Abstract: We use panel data from El Salvador to investigate the intra-household allocation of labor as a risk-coping strategy. We show that adverse agricultural productivity shocks primarily increased male migration to the US with much smaller effects on female migration. This is consistent with the observation that the bulk of households allocated no women to the agricultural sector. These shocks also increased the number of hours that the household devoted to agricultural activities. These results do not contradict each other if one considers the possibility that the shocks had non-monotonic effects on shadow wages during the survey period. In contrast, damage sustained from the 2001 earthquakes exclusively stunted female migration. We argue that the reasons for this were that the earthquakes increased the demand for home production and that most men in our data are not engaged in domestic production at all.

Keywords: Migration; Labor Supply; Insurance; Intra-Household Allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-ias and nep-mig
Date: Written
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http://www.economics.hawaii.edu/research/workingpapers/WP_07-19R.pdf First version, 2007 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Migration, Risk and the Intra-Household Allocation of Labor in El Salvador (2007)
Working Paper: Migration, Risk and the Intra-Household Allocation of Labor in El Salvador (2008)
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