Human Capital, Family Composition, and International Migration

This dissertation includes three essays focusing on the relationships among human capital, family composition and international migration. The evidence from Mexico-U.S. migration supports my hypotheses.;The first essay demonstrates that migration experience increases return migrants' earnings in the home country on the condition that the migration stay is sufficiently long and mostly uninterrupted. Migration is widely viewed as an investment in human capital. However, due to the imperfect transferability of skills and knowledge across countries, migration trips are also career interruptions, especially for return migrants who may meanwhile experience depreciation of home country-specific skills. Employing the revised human capital earnings function, the empirical study shows that only a barely interrupted US experience longer than five years, regardless of the legal status of the migration trips, predicts higher earnings of male return migrants in Mexico than comparable non-migrants. Robust findings emerge controlling for unobserved individual characteristics or using instrumental variables to deal with the self-selection and endogeneity. Short migration stays in the US and frequent traveling provide return migrants no wage premium in Mexico.;The second essay analyzes the determinants of migration duration focusing on family composition and human capital. A utility maximization model is built to show that migrants face a trade-off between avoiding psychic costs from leaving family members and accumulating wealth to support their consumption. The empirical analysis on Mexican men's US experience carried out using the hazard model shows that marriage and children, which imply a heavier financial burden, are negatively associated with migrants' duration in the US. Fathers with more young children under age 12 stay even shorter, because taking care of them is time intensive.;The third essay supports the first essay. It explores the determinants of migrants' host country language proficiency, focusing on migrants' human capital investment strategies in both the home country and the host country. A model is developed to illustrate how migrants allocate their time or effort in the origin and the destination when the returns to different skills and the efficiencies of learning these skills differ by country. Migrants' human capital investment strategies are sensitive to their duration in both countries, and their host country language proficiency changes accordingly. The Ordered Probit analysis on Mexican male immigrants' English skills shows that holding the US migration duration constant Mexicans have lower levels of English proficiency if they stay longer in Mexico. In addition, Mexicans have better English skills when they start their migration trips earlier in their life and stay longer in the US.