I use unique data from parent-child linked surveys and experiments conducted in Fall 2019 in the Ternopil region of Ukraine to investigate the short-term effect of paternal absence due to circular migration on socio-emotional skills of children. Understanding how circular migration affects the socio-emotional skills of children is essential because socio-emotional skills have a significant impact on a child's success in later life and human capital formation. To identify the causal effect of current paternal absence due to circular migration, I exploit the idea that by restricting the sample to children whose fathers have all had recent circular migration experiences, we can eliminate the bias associated with the endogeneity of circular migration. Furthermore, using quasi-exogenous variation in the timing of return migration induced by bilateral migration laws between Ukraine and Poland, I reduce the bias related to the endogeneity of return migration decision. The results show that current paternal absence due to circular migration negatively affects the socio-emotional skills of children left behind. These findings are not explained by differences in cognitive skills and are robust to including school and classroom fixed effects. Overall, this result suggests that circular migration is not necessarily a "triple-win" solution that benefits all involved parties.
This paper examines the impact of remittances on classroom-level educational performance in Armenia, a country where one out of five children have a seasonal migrant worker father. Focusing on educational performance at the classroom level not only captures the spillover effects of remittances to non-migrant families in the local economy but also peer effects to children from non-migrant families who study in the same classroom. To identify the causal effects, we exploit within-school across-cohort variation in exposure to the sharp decrease of the Russian Ruble following the annexation of Crimea in March 2014. We find that the fall of the Russian Ruble has no significant effect on fourth- and ninth-grade students' math performance. These results are consistent with the recent findings in the literature on the economics of education that suggest that unconditional income transfers have no significant effect on child learning outcomes (Heckman and Mosso, 2014). However, we find that the fall of the Russian Ruble has significantly decreased the performance of 12th- grade students in math, foreign language, and science. These results are likely to be driven by the fact that many students in Armenia attend paid tutoring classes at the end of their high school to prepare for the university exams. The reduction of income due to the fall of the Russian Ruble may decrease their ability to pay for private classes and consecutively reduce their performance.
This paper examines the impact of international migration opportunities on origin-country skills composition by exploiting changes in migration opportunities induced by visa liberalization between EU countries and Ukraine. We use individual-level data from the universe of centralized test results and subject choices from end-of-high-school exams held from 2016 to 2019 in Ukraine. We exploit regional variation in aspirations to migrate to EU countries prior to the introduction of the visa liberalisation policy and rely on Difference in Difference and instrumental variable approaches to identify the causal effects of the policy. Our results suggest that greater opportunities to emigrate to EU countries increased (decreased) the probability students will choose subjects that are more likely to lead to internationally transferable (origin country-specific) skills in Ukraine. We find no evidence that greater opportunities to emigrate to the EU significantly affect student performance or the probability of failing exams in subjects that are likely to lead to more internationally transferable skills. This suggests that the observed increase in the share of students choosing more internationally transferable subjects was not accompanied by a decrease in student performance or in the competitiveness of the study programs.