Essays on international migration

0585400 - NHU-C 2025 CZ eng D - Thesis
Adunts, Davit
Essays on international migration.
Prague: Charles University, CERGE, 2024. 70 s.
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GA20-31615S
Grant - others:UK(CZ) GAUK 206420; UK(CZ) GAUK 88218
Institutional support: Cooperatio-COOP
Keywords : international migration * human capital * Ukraine
Subject RIV: AH - Economics
https://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/dissertations/Dissertation_Final_Adunts.pdf

This thesis explores the effects of international migration on human capital formation in countries of origin. The first chapter investigates the short-run effect of paternal absence due to circular migration on the perseverance skills of children left behind. Using exogenous variation in the timing of return migration induced by bilateral migration laws between Ukraine and Poland, I show that paternal absence due to circular migration negatively affects the perseverance skills of children left behind in Ukraine. This result is not explained by cognitive skills and is robust to including school and classroom fixed effects. The second chapter (jointly with Bohdana Kurylo) examines the impact of international migration opportunities on the composition of origin-country skills by exploiting changes in migration opportunities induced by visa liberalization between EU countries and Ukraine. Our results suggest that greater opportunities to emigrate to EU countries increased the probability that Ukrainian high-school students will choose subjects that are more likely to lead to internationally transferable skills. We find no evidence that greater opportunities to emigrate to the EU significantly affect student performance or the probability of failing exams in subjects that are likely to lead to more internationally transferable skills. This suggests that the observed increase in the share of students choosing more internationally transferable subjects was not accompanied by a decrease in student performance or in the competitiveness of the study programs. The third chapter (jointly with Geghetsik Afunts and Mariola Pytlikova) uses across-region variation in exposure to the sharp fall in the value of the Russian ruble in 2014 to examine the impact of remittances on classroom-level educational performance in Armenia. We find that the 2014 decrease in the value of remittances significantly decreased the performance of 12th-grade students in math. The negative effect was larger for boys than for girls. We provide suggestive evidence that this is likely driven by an increase in employment for boys relative to girls, as boys are more likely to engage in paid work to compensate for a loss of income due to reduced remittances. However, we find no evidence that changes in remittances affected the performance of fourth- and ninth-grade students.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0353118