Publications des chercheurs de PSE

This paper provides strong evidence that adult mortality has a negative impact on children educational outcomes, both over the short and the long run, in rural Madagascar. The underlying longitudinal data and the difference-in-differences strategy used overcome most of the previous cross-sectional study limitations, such as failure to control for child and household pre-death characteristics and unobserved heterogeneity. This paper also pays special attention to the heterogeneity, robustness, and long-run persistence of effects. Results show that orphans are on average 10 pp less likely to attend school than their nonorphaned counterparts, this effect being even more pronounced for girls and young children from poorer households. Results on adults further show that those orphaned during childhood eventually completed less education. These findings suggest that not only do households suffering unexpected shocks resort to schooling adjustments as an immediate risk-coping strategy, but also that adversity has long-lasting effects on human capital accumulation.

The economic literature provides much evidence of the positive impact of social capital on migrants' economic outcomes, in particular through assistance upon arrival and insurance in times of hardship. Yet, although much less documented, migrant networks may well have a great influence on remittances to their home country and particularly to their origin households. Given all the services provided by the network, the fear of being ostracized by network members and being left with no support could provide incentives for migrants to commit to prevailing redistribution norms. In this perspective, remittances may be a fee that migrants pay to get access to network services. In this paper, we thus analyze to what extent migrant networks in the destination country influence the degree to which migrants meet the claims of those left behind. We first review existing models of remitting behavior and investigate how the potential role of networks could affect their main predictions. We then provide a simple illustrative theoretical framework to account for the double impact networks may have on remitting behavior, through the provision of services to migrants and the spread of information flows between home and host countries. We finally use an original dataset of 602 Senegalese migrants residing in France and Italy to explore the main predictions of our model.

Migrant's selection issues are tackled by a great number of articles since the founder paper by Borjas (1987), which applies to international migration the Roy model of self-selection. However, most migration models usually regard location choices as an individual income-maximizing strategy and do not consider the collective dimension of the decision to migrate. In this paper, we therefore extend the Roy model to account for a household model of migration and derive its implications on migrant's selection. Since when choosing the one among its members who is to migrate the household maximizes its earnings including further remittances, migrant selection in this case may di er from what is expected from an individual decision model. We de facto speci cally tackle the so far under-explored issue of intra-household selection into migration and nally aim at determining which component of the household utility – earnings, remittances or non-monetary factors – mostly drives location choices. We provide empirical evidence from a unique matched sample of 900 Senegalese migrants in three destination countries – France, Italy and Mauritania – and their origin households in Senegal.

This paper fills the gap between individual selection models and collective approaches of migration. We build a theoretical model in order to account for household-based migration decisions and derive its implications on migrant selection. Assuming that the origin household maximizes a collective utility including earnings but also further remittances when choosing the one among its members who is to migrate, migrant selection in this case may differ from what is predicted by a pure individual decision model. Therefore, we specifically tackle the so far under-explored issue of intra-household selection into migration in order to identify what are the key determinants of household members' location choices. We derive our estimation procedure from an extension of the Roy-Dahl model and provide empirical evidence using a unique matched sample of 926 Senegalese migrants in three destination countries – France, Italy and Mauritania – and their origin household in Senegal. Our results show that expected remittances, along with earnings differentials, play a major role in shaping intra-household selection patterns, which stands in striking contrast with usual predictions from individual self-selection models.