The use of bilateral data for the analysis of international migration is at the same time a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because the dyadic dimension of the data allows researchers to ...address a number of previously unanswered questions, but it is also a curse for the various analytical challenges it gives rise to. This paper presents the theoretical foundations of the estimation of gravity models of international migration, and the main difficulties that have to be tackled in the econometric analysis, such as the nature of migration data, how to account for multilateral resistance to migration or endogeneity. We also review some empirical evidence that has considered these issues.
Human migration: the big data perspective Sîrbu, Alina; Andrienko, Gennady; Andrienko, Natalia ...
International journal of data science and analytics,
05/2021, Volume:
11, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
How can big data help to understand the migration phenomenon? In this paper, we try to answer this question through an analysis of various phases of migration, comparing traditional and novel data ...sources and models at each phase. We concentrate on three phases of migration, at each phase describing the state of the art and recent developments and ideas. The first phase includes
the journey
, and we study migration flows and stocks, providing examples where big data can have an impact. The second phase discusses
the stay
, i.e. migrant integration in the destination country. We explore various data sets and models that can be used to quantify and understand migrant integration, with the final aim of providing the basis for the construction of a novel multi-level integration index. The last phase is related to the effects of migration on the source countries and
the return
of migrants.
Social networks are known to influence migration decisions, but connections between individuals remain usually unobserved. Surveys conducted by Gallup in 147 countries provide information on ...migration intentions and on distance-one connections in each destination. The distribution of distance-one connections mirrors the one of migrant stocks, and intentions are informative about actual decisions. The estimation of origin-specific conditional logit models reveals that distance-one connections can alter the ranking of most pairs of destinations. We test the validity of the distributional assumptions that underlie identification and perform extensive robustness checks, thus mitigating the concerns about the threats to identification posed by unobservables.
Return migration exerts a wide-ranging influence upon the countries of origin of the migrants. We analyze whether returnees adjust their fertility choices to the norms that prevail in their previous ...countries of destination using Egyptian household-level data. Egyptian men migrate predominantly toward other Arab countries characterized by a higher number of children per woman. Relying on a two-step instrumental variable approach to control for the endogeneity of the migration decisions, we show that return migration has a positive and significant influence on marital childbearing.
The migration literature typically assumes that the migration of a household member is not associated with further variations in co-residence choices. We rely on a Mexican panel survey to provide ...novel evidence on the correlation between the occurrence of an international migration episode and changes in household composition. Migrant households have a higher probability of receiving a new member within one year around the migration episode. Attrition is significantly higher among migrant households, and we provide evidence that this is partly due to the dissolution of the household of origin of the migrant. The endogeneity of co-residence choices induces an undercount of migration episodes, as shown with data from the 2000 Census. This has implications for the analysis of migrant selection and of the effects on the individuals left behind. Dealing with these analytical challenges requires an approach to data collection that is less dependent on variations in household composition.
•Household composition is typically assumed as exogenous with respect to migration.•We provide evidence of its endogeneity using panel survey data from Mexico.•Retrospective questions fail to record migration episodes because of endogeneity.•This non-reporting of migration episodes has major analytical implications.•We propose an alternative approach for data collection in origin countries.
We analyse the influence of the recent wave of migration on the incidence of poverty among stayers in Ecuador. We draw our data from a survey that provides detailed information on migrants. The ...analysis reveals a significant negative effect of migration on poverty among migrant households. This effect is substantially smaller than the one that we find focusing on recipient households. We explore the factors that account for this divergence. Our analysis entails that the existing empirical evidence on the relationship between remittances and poverty does not need to be informative about the size of the direct poverty-reduction potential of migration.
•Wages at destination are used as a synthetic measure of migrants’ quality.•Wage distributions for low- and high-educated migrants to the US largely overlap.•Overlap coexists with substantial and ...significant differences in means.•Relying more on education for selecting immigrants could fail to improve quality.
Many destination countries consider implementing points-based migration systems as a way to improve migrants’ quality, but our understanding of the actual effects of selective policies is limited. We use data from the ACS 2001–2017 to analyze the overlap in the wage distribution of low- and high-educated recent migrants from different origins after controlling for other observable characteristics. When we randomly match a high- with a low-educated immigrant from the same country, more than one-quarter of time the low-educated immigrant has a higher hourly wage, notwithstanding a statistically significant difference in the mean wage of the two groups for most origins. For 98 out of 114 countries, this synthetic measure of the overlap in the two wage distributions stands above the corresponding figure for natives. We also find that at least 82% of the variance in log wages for migrants with a given number of years of schooling is due to differences within rather than across countries. This suggests that heavily relying on education to select immigrants might fail to markedly improve their quality.
We use mobile phone usage data to measure the extent of segregation of Syrian refugees in Turkey, and analyze its role in their internal mobility patterns. We construct a range of dissimilarity and ...normalized isolation indices using the hourly phone call volume of refugees and natives. The richness of the data allows us to compute the indices across different provinces and over time. Segregation levels show high variation across the country, with significantly lower levels of segregation in provinces with a higher share of refugees. Refugee mobility across provinces over time appears to be negatively correlated with segregation at destination, while native mobility is not. Based on data from Istanbul, segregation does not influence intra-province mobility. This is possibly due to the differences in segregation indices across the hours of the day, suggesting that residential segregation is higher than labor market segregation.
•We use mobile phone data to measure mobility and segregation of Syrian refugees in Turkey.•Data reveal substantial differences in segregation across different provinces.•Residential segregation is higher than labor market segregation.•Refugees move towards Turkish provinces where segregation is lower.
We provide evidence that most Mexican children exposed to the international migration of their fathers experience further variations in their living arrangements or the dissolution of the marital ...union of their parents. Children left behind typically join the household of their maternal grandparents. These changes have relevant implications for the analysis of the effects of migration and remittances: they interfere with the identification of instances of paternal migration in standard cross-sectional or longitudinal surveys, and they can give rise to heterogeneity in the effects of interest making some key household-level variables endogenous with respect to the treatment.
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