Impact of migration on job satisfaction, professional education and the informal sector

This dissertation focuses on three aspects of the economic life of migrants' relatives who remained in the source country. In the second chapter, we argue that migration increases the job dissatisfaction of migrants' relatives who work in the source country. The family's migration experience allows its members to construct expectations on earnings from migration using information either from the size of remittances or directly from migrants. If their expected earnings from migration greatly exceed their current wages in the source country, migrants' relatives become more dissatisfied with their current jobs. In the third chapter, we argue that migration has both positive and negative effects on education. In estimating the positive impact of remittances we suggest controlling for migration's side effects by including a dummy variable indicating whether there is a migrant in the household. This way, holding remittances constant, the coefficient on the dummy variable captures other negative side effects of migration as a change in the intercept between households with migrants and households without migrants. In the fourth chapter, we discuss how migration reduces informality in the source country: migrants' incomes in new locations and income earned in the home informal economy become an imperfect trade-off. It is also because professional workers have more opportunities to engage in informal activities enabling them to forgo migration, but low-skilled non-professionals do not. We offer concluding comments in the final chapter.