Three Essays On Migration, Remittances And Human Capital Formation

Abstract

This dissertation investigates three topics related to migration and human capital formation in developing countries. The first essay attempts to determine the conditions under which exposure to international migration can have a positive effect on economic growth. Numerical simulations show that the lower the contribution of private investment in education to human capital accumulation in the source countries, the higher the likelihood that exposure to international migration negatively impacts economic growth if migration is sufficiently high. The level of efficient government expenditure on education is higher for an economy with migration than for an economy without migration only if migration has a positive effect on growth. The second essay analyzes the determinants of remittances using household data from Ecuador. It provides empirical evidence as follows: remittances and household migration size are non-monotonically related, remittances are altruistically motivated, the size of remittances decreases with time after migration and the Ecuadorian migrants who moved to the U.S. are more likely to remit and to remit more than those who moved to other countries. The third essay of this dissertation combines data from the 2002 National Population Census and the distribution of the number of victims and human rights violations across 22 departments to examine how the worst period of the civil war in Guatemala, between 1979 and 1984, affected human capital accumulation. The identification strategy exploits variation in the war's intensity across departments and which cohorts were of school age during the war. It finds a strong negative impact of the civil war on female education. The 2002 data reveal that the worst period of the war appears to have intensified both regional and gender disparities.