Fertility and migration

Over the past three decades, the drop in fertility rates has been accompanied by highrates of migration in several developing countries. We argue that migration affects fertilitynegatively in the countries of origin. To analyze the effect of migration we build a fertilitychoice model, based on De La Croix (2014), with endogenous migration decisions. In thisframework, when a member of the household migrates abroad, income increases due toremittances but at the same time, individuals left at home face a much higher opportunity costtime. This means that household members have less time to devote to taking care of the childrenand the consequence is a decrease in fertility. We calibrate the model to match the migrationrates and to quantify the effect of migration on the fertility rate in those countries. To this end,we first show that the model can replicate the high rate of migrations in several developingcountries. Then we perform two counterfactual exercises to address the effect of ourmechanism. In the first exercise, we keep the migration constant as in the benchmark modelwhile we give a higher value to the time cost of migration. The result is an increase in fertility.In the second exercise, we quantify how the differences in the time cost of migration affect thedifferences in fertility. We found that the time cost of migration accounts for 53% of the fall inthe fertility of the developing countries in our sample between 1990 and 2017