Sons or Daughters? The Impact of Children's Migration on the Health and Well-Being of Parents Left Behind

Jackline Wahba and Chuhong Wang ()
Additional contact information
Chuhong Wang: University of Southampton

No 12370, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the impact of adult children's internal migration on the health and subjective well-being of elderly parents left behind, distinguishing between the gender of the migrant children. To overcome migration endogeneity, we exploit novel and exogenous variation in children's astrological characteristics and apply instrumental variables methods. We find a positive effect of the migration of daughters on parents' health and life satisfaction, but no such beneficial effects when sons migrate. We further explore the mechanism through which this gender-biased migration effect may arise. Our findings have important implications for regions and countries that have high rates of female emigration.

Keywords: migration; health; subjective well-being; gender; Chinese zodiac signs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J14 J16 O15 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2019-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-hap, nep-hea, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp12370.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:iza:izadps:dp12370

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().