Doctoral thesis (Dissertations and theses)
ESSAYS ON THE ECONOMICS OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION
Montes Viñas, Ana Cecilia
2021
 

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Keywords :
International Migration; Gravity Model of Migration; Economics; Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood; Migrant Children; Immigration flows; Regression Discontinuity Design; Colfuturo; Aspirations; Ancestral distance; Study Abroad
Abstract :
[en] The present dissertation consists of three main chapters of self-contained works about international human migration and migrant's integration in the host society. The first chapter introduces the general outline of the dissertation and briefly explains the research questions explored in each chapter. The second chapter studies the effect of migration networks and long-term cultural distance on migration flows. The main research question is whether the diaspora effect on migration flows is larger when the cultural distance between the country of origin and destination is large. We use an unbalanced panel database of bilateral migration flows data from 1960 to 2009 for about 175 sending countries to 32 destination countries. We proxy long-term cultural distance using ancestral distance, also called genetic distance. Based on the micro-founded gravity model for migration, we estimate the interaction between the diaspora size and ancestral distance using the Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (Santos Silva \& Tenreyro, 2006). We find evidence of a positive and significant interaction effect between the network effect and ancestral distance on international migration flows, however, this effect is small once we control for omitted unobserved determinants of migration flows. The third chapter studies the educational performance of the children of migrants in the United States of America. It pushes forward the hypothesis that misalignment between expectations and aspirations crucially affects the educational outcomes of immigrant young adults. It shows that the difference in school performance between migrant children and natives lies within the aspirations and expectations that migrant children form. This chapter uses the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a longitudinal database representative of American high schools that surveys adolescents between the grades 7-12 collected by the Carolina Population Center. The chapter shows that a positive difference between aspirations and expectations is a driving force for higher effort and better education outcomes of immigrant teenagers. This force resolves the well-known immigrant paradox. This result is specific to migrant children and does not hold for second-generation migrant pupils who appear quite acculturated to the USA context. In the fourth chapter, the relationship between financial aid and foreign education at the postgraduate level is evaluated. I use a sample of Colombian graduates who applied to a financial aid program that sponsors the completion of master's degrees abroad. It studies the case of a Scholarship-Loan program provided by the Colfuturo Foundation and the Administrative Department of Science, Technology, and Innovation (Colciencias). Students with an undergraduate degree can apply to receipt a fund of 50000 dollars to finance their post-graduate studies in any country in the world, with the condition to come back to Columbia. The characteristics of the selection process of the program allow the implementation of a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to estimate the causal effect of the scholarship-loan program on the probability of completing studies abroad. Given Colfuturo’s selection process, the assignment of the fund is expected to be distributed quasi-randomly for the applicants around the vicinity of a cut-off point. This methodology allows for the estimation of the local average treatment effect (LATE) of the program. I employ the administrative records from the scholarship provider combined with internet sources. The results show that the scholarship-loan program is an effective tool to increase the probability of completing studies abroad by approximately 30 percentage points. The results are extremely robust across estimation methods.
Disciplines :
International economics
Author, co-author :
Montes Viñas, Ana Cecilia ;  University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance (FDEF)
Language :
English
Title :
ESSAYS ON THE ECONOMICS OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION
Defense date :
14 October 2021
Number of pages :
179
Institution :
Unilu - University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Degree :
Docteur en Sciences Economiques
Promotor :
President :
Jury member :
Dupuy, Arnaud 
Moriconi, Simone
Ragot, Lionel
Focus Area :
Migration and Inclusive Societies
Available on ORBilu :
since 17 December 2021

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