Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper examines the causal impact of parental migration on children’s educational outcomes in Romania, a country that has experienced unprecedented temporary labor emigration after its 2007 EU accession. With more than one-tenth of Romanian nationals working abroad, the European Commission and advocacy group’s estimate about one in five children have experienced or are experiencing parental emigration. There are two main mechanisms through which parental out-migration influences children, each with competing directions. First, remittances can relax household income constraints, free up time from income-generating activities, and offer income security to improve children’s educational outcomes. Second, parental-absence may impose psychological costs on children due to family disruption, lack of supervision of caregiver, and time re-allocation away from educational activities. The analysis relies on nationally-representative data from Romania’s 2011 census of population and housing, which offers the first national snapshot of population including migration behavior after the country’s EU-succession. To address the endogeneity of parental migration, historical county-level migration is used to instrument for parental migration, with the identifying assumption that historical migration does not directly affect children’s educational outcomes. Preliminary results indicate that children of migrant parents have lower likelihood of attending high-school than children from non-migrant households, suggesting that the negative effects of parental absence offset the potential positive effects of remittances. From a policy perspective, findings have implications for longer-term human capital accumulation in developing regions. This serves a basis for orienting public policies to better manage familial and social consequences in regions with high incidence of labor migration.