The Impact of Migration on Educational Outcomes of left Behind Children: Evidence from the Philippines

This Research Assistantship position is being offered in association with the Yale Economic Growth Center’s (EGC) pilot Data Science for Development Program.

Educational outcomes are a key determinant of adult socioeconomic success. Understanding the importance of parental inputs, particularly monetary and parental time investments, on a child’s educational outcomes and development is, therefore, an important issue.

Fundamentally, a parent faces a trade-off between working to financially provide for a child and spending time to care for a child. When a parent temporarily migrates for work and leaves family members behind, they face the most extreme version of this problem. The temporary migrant has the opportunity to earn a drastically higher income at the cost of being completely absent from their child’s life. This research project seeks to answer two central questions:

1. What is the impact of temporary migration on the educational outcomes of left-behind children?
2. What are the causal impacts of parental time investments and monetary investments on a child’s educational outcomes?

These questions will be answered using a groundbreaking data set that is currently being collected in the Philippines. The RA will assist in the collection of several key external sources of data which will be merged with the data being collected, producing key statistics and insights that allow us to monitor data as it is being collected, and the data cleaning and data management of incoming data that is being collected. The RA will also have the opportunity to work with several major Filipino government departments (Department of Education, Department of Migrant Workers, OWWA, and POEA) and UN agencies (ILO, UNICEF, and UN Women) as they assist in broadening the online presence of this study in the Philippines.