What drives earnings of return migrants? Evidence from Latvia

Mihails Hazans

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper analyzes determinants of earnings of return migrants using very rich information on jobs and earnings in Latvia, as well as the foreign experience of more than 1000 returnees surveyed in 2016. After controlling for personal characteristics and hours worked, we find significant and sizable positive effects on returnees' earnings at the main job for various components of specific human capital accumulated abroad: duration of work abroad in a particular sector and occupation; any knowledge acquired abroad which is used at the job in Latvia; foreign experience in an occupation related to one's education or qualification; specific skills which make the respondent a difficult-to-replace employee at his workplace. These results hold true also after controlling for a rich set of job characteristics. By contrast, general experience accumulated abroad (proxied by duration of stay abroad) positively affects earnings in Latvia only for those return migrants who have completed abroad (in an EU or OECD country) some tertiary education. Higher education obtained abroad (in the EU or OECD) is shown to positively affect post-returning earnings through a number of other channels.

Keywords: return migrants; earnings; foreign experience; specific experience; general experience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-05
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Proceedings of 10th International Scientific Conference “New Challenges of Economic and Business Development - Productivity and Economic Growth. Riga, Latvia, May 10-12 2018” (2018): pp. 235-245

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/118599/1/Hazans_Wh ... eturn%20migrants.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:118599

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().