Gendered Migration, Selection, and Labour Outcomes for Rural Southern Mexico

Abstract: This article explores the relationships between migration, return migration, and occupational mobility. It develops a theoretical framework of potential earnings and migration costs that incorporates explicitly the potential for self-selection in migration into distinctive labor market contexts including return migration. It deploys a novel sequential econometric strategy, namely a Mixed Latent Endogenous Switching Regression (ML-ESR) to minimize endogenous selection issues in the estimation process. It exploits multi-topic primary data collected in 2005-2006 from households originating in coffee producing communities in the south of Mexico, an area that underwent a period of dynamic change in terms of state led support for education, human capital accumulation, and domestic and international migration in the decade prior to the survey. Migration and return migration choices, and the underlying selection-feature of ‘moving’, are consistently and positively related to better occupational outcomes for females and males. Yet, considerable heterogeneity occurs by gender. One major difference is that for females both domestic and international migration are strongly associated with higher occupational outcomes, while for males migration to the US leaves many in agriculture, i.e., the same occupation as what non-migrant males primarily do in the home villages. Another major gender difference in migration-occupation links is that female return migrants are more likely to resume the occupation of homemaker, as compared to male return migrants being less likely to return to agriculture as their occupation in the home community.

Biography: Bradford L. Barham is Professor at the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has a PhD in Economics from Stanford University. His research program centres on themes related to agriculture, technology adoption and innovation, and environment and development issues, especially in Latin America. He has active research projects on advice taking and timing of adoption of GM crops; landowner’s willingness to participate in biomass provisioning for bioenergy; optimal marketing and production diversification strategies for multi-crop vegetable farmers; migration, education, and job opportunities for rural youth in Oaxaca, Mexico; certified coffee schemes and economic outcomes for producers; and, migration and peach adoption among farmers in an irrigated valley of Bolivia.