Paternal migration and schooling choices. A study on children left behind in Ecuador

Abstract

Scholars dedicated to exploring the effects of migration on children left behind are commonly interested in human capital outcomes such as education. However, when focusing on children whose parents migrated, the effects are still not conclusive. This study investigates the role of paternal migration on schooling choices among children left behind in Ecuador using household-level data from a survey conducted in 2006, which contains detailed information about migrants and their households. We estimate the effect of having a migrant father using two types of doubly robust matching estimators: the matching estimator and the blocking estimator. We find that children with a migrant father have, on average, a 17.2–21.4 percentage point higher probability of attending a private school compared to children with no migrant father. Additionally, an extra 4.52–6.26 US dollars per month is spent on the education of children with a migrant father, which amounts to 45.2–62.6 US dollars per academic year. Despite these results, there is no evidence of an effect on years of schooling. Our findings also show that remittances sent by the father improve school investment more than remittances sent by other relatives, particularly among children living in low-income households.