Kiel Working Papers, Kiel Institute for World Economics
No 1858:
Intra-Family Migration Decisions and Elderly Left Behind
Tobias Stoehr
Abstract: In many poor countries with high emigration rates elderly
people are left behind without care when their children migrate. Without a
functioning market in private care migrants face a difficult trade-off
between working their way out of poverty and providing informal care once
their parents become frail or sick. I develop a non-cooperative model of
siblings' interactions that explains how chain migration can lead to a
breakdown of traditional caregiving structures while an opposing endogenous
effect increases family members' incentives to specialize as caregiver. The
model's predictions are tested using novel data from Moldova and found to
perform better than predictions of some established migration models. The
empirical analysis suggests that migration and staying in order to provide
care are strategic complements for children of elderly parents in most
families. This is evidence of a promising resilience of families' informal
security arrangements to large-scale migration
Keywords: migration, elderly care, remittances, intra-family allocation,informal security networks; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: F22,; J14,; I19,; D10; (follow links to similar papers)
37 pages, July 2013
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