Francisca M. Antman

Earnings Mobility and Measurement Error: A Pseudo-Panel Approach

The degree of mobility in incomes is often seen as an important measure of the equality of opportunity in a society and of the flexibility and freedom of its labor market. But estimation of mobility using panel data is biased by the presence of measurement error and non-random attrition from the panel. This paper shows that dynamic pseudo-panel methods can be used to consistently estimate measures of absolute and conditional mobility in the presence of non-classical measurement errors. These methods are applied to data on earnings from a Mexican quarterly rotating panel. Absolute mobility in earnings is found to be very low in Mexico, suggesting that the high level of inequality found in the cross-section will persist over time. However, the paper finds conditional mobility to be high, so that households are able to recover quickly from earnings shocks. These findings suggest a role for policies which address underlying inequalities in earnings opportunities.

The Impact of Migration on Family Left Behind

This paper addresses the effects of migration on families left behind and offers new evidence on the impact of migration on elderly parents. After discussing the identification issues involved in estimation, I review the literature on the effects of migration on the education and health of non-migrant children as well as the labor supply of non-migrant spouses. Finally, I address the impact of adult child migration on contributions toward non-migrant parents as well as the effects on parental health. Results show that elderly parents receive lower time contributions from all of their children when one child migrates.

Poverty Traps and Nonlinear Income Dynamics with Measurement Error and Individual Heterogeneity

Theories of poverty traps stand in sharp contrast to the view that anybody can make it through hard work and thrift. However, empirical detection of poverty traps is complicated by the lack of long panels, measurement error, and attrition. This paper shows how dynamic pseudo-panel methods can overcome these difficulties, allowing estimation of non-linear income dynamics and testing for the presence of poverty traps. The paper explicitly allows for individual heterogeneity in income dynamics to account for the possibility that particular groups of individuals may face traps, even if the average individual does not. These methods are used to examine the evidence for a poverty trap in labor earnings, income, and expenditure in Mexico and are compared to panel data estimates from a short rotating panel. The results do find evidence of nonlinearities in household income dynamics and demonstrate large bias in the panel data estimates. Nevertheless, even after allowing for heterogeneity and accounting for measurement error, the paper finds no evidence of the existence of a poverty trap for any group in the sample.

Elderly Care and Intrafamily Resource Allocation when Children Migrate

This paper considers the intrafamily allocation of elderly care in the context of international migration where migrant children may be able to provide financial assistance to their parents but are unable to offer physical care. To investigate sibling interaction, I estimate best response functions for individual physical and financial contributions as a function of siblings’ contributions. After addressing the endogeneity of siblings’ contributions and selection into migration, I find evidence that siblings’ financial contributions function as strategic complements while time contributions operate as strategic substitutes. This suggests that contributions may be based on both strategic bequest and public good motivations.

Spousal Employment and Intra-Household Bargaining Power

This article considers the relationship between work status and decision-making power of the head of household and his spouse. I used household fixed effects models to address the possibility that spousal work status may be correlated with unobserved factors that also affect bargaining power within the home. Consistent with the hypothesis that greater economic resources yield greater bargaining power, I found that the spouse of the head of household is more likely to be involved in making decisions when she has been employed. Similarly, the head of household is less likely to be the sole decision-maker when his spouse works.

Incentives to Identify: Racial Identity in the Age of Affirmative Action

We link data on racial self-identification with changes in statelevel affirmative action policies to ask whether racial self-identification responds to economic incentives. We find that after a state bans affirmative action, multiracial individuals who face an incentive to identify under affirmative action are about 30% less likely to identify with their minority group. In contrast, multiracial individuals who face a disincentive to identify under affirmative action are roughly 20% more likely to identify with their minority group once affirmative action policies are banned.

How Does Adult Child Migration Affect the Health of Elderly Parents Left Behind? Evidence from Mexico

This paper considers whether the health of elderly parents is adversely affected by the international migration of their children. Estimation of a causal effect is complicated by the fact that children may migrate in response to a parents health status and there may be other unobserved factors influencing both parental health and child migration. I address this endogeneity problem by using instrumental variables methods where I instrument for having a child in the U.S. with the sex and married ratios of the children of the elderly respondents. To ensure the instruments are not influencing elderly health directly, I include childrens contributions to their parents in the analysis. I also perform falsification tests which support the view that the causal mechanism is operating through childrens migration. Overall, the evidence suggests that having a child migrate to the U.S. raises the probability that the elderly parent in Mexico will be in poor physical health. I conclude by exploring the possibility that the deleterious effects of childrens migration on mental health are driving this relationship.

Schooling and labor market effects of temporary authorization: evidence from DACA

This paper explores the labor market and schooling effects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative, which provides work authorization to eligible immigrants along with a temporary reprieve from deportation. The analysis relies on a difference-in-differences approach which exploits the discontinuity in program rules to compare eligible individuals to ineligible, likely undocumented immigrants before and after the program went into effect. To address potential endogeneity concerns, we focus on youths that likely met DACA’s schooling requirement when the program was announced. We find that DACA reduced the probability of school enrollment of eligible higher-educated individuals, as well as some evidence that it increased the employment likelihood of men, in particular. Together, these findings suggest that a lack of authorization may lead individuals to enroll in school when working is not a viable option. Thus, once employment restrictions are relaxed and the opportunity costs of higher education rise, eligible individuals may reduce investments in schooling.