My doctoral thesis is now open access. It examines the relationship between internal migration and human capital among young people. Specifically, it looks at migration’s drivers, effects, and timing by addressing three research questions:
1. How do transitions to adulthood relate to the decision to migrate?
2. Does youth migration affect cognitive and psychosocial skills?
3. Does the effect of child migration on skills depend on the age at migration?
Regarding the first question, I argue that ‘favourable self-selection’ into migration is not systematic across young migrants: they are a very heterogeneous segment of the population and it would be a mistake to label them as one single group since life-course decisions made during the transition to adulthood shape their migration patterns. For example, those who move for studies are on average better educated than non-migrants, whereas those who move for work or for family formation are not. This is a crucial insight since understanding the determinants of youth migration, which is when most of migration happens, is important to disentangle the effect of migration on skills.
With respect to the second question, I show that migration has an impact both on cognitive and psychosocial skills, although these effects are heterogeneous across subgroups of migrants since, as mentioned above, the reasons for their move shape the impact of migration. This is important because it is what one chooses to do after the move what ultimately shapes the impact of migration. In this chapter, I formalise these relationships with a conceptual framework that delineates the potential mechanisms through which migration may affect skills.
Finally, regarding the third question, I provide evidence that the hypothesis of sensitive periods at early ages dominates the impact of age at migration on skills: younger migrants perform better than older ones in both cognitive and psychosocial skills. In this chapter, I propose a conceptual framework, in which I argue that the capacity to adapt is what ultimately affects the impact of migration on skills. This is important since it informs policymakers on how to tailor initiatives that encourage migration of families with children, and on how to facilitate their corresponding assimilation to the host locality through education.
To my knowledge, this is the first doctoral thesis that focuses entirely on young migrants and their cognitive and psychosocial skills using longitudinal data from a rich study, such as Young Lives. Check my thesis here.
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