Abandons scolaires, marchés du travail urbains, et opportunités de migration

A very relevant fraction of the internal migrants in developing countries is made up of teenagers. The paper investigates whether migration during schooling age is associated to higher or to lower education attainments of the young. In a model of rural-urban migration, credit constraints and uncertainty over the returns of high schooling in the cities can entrap migrant families into under-employment, with negative effects on schooling investments of their offsprings. Unique longitudinal data from Thailand show that young migrants and migrants? offsprings have on average higher drop-out rates than the corresponding generation of stayers. A simultaneous model for schooling drop-outs and migration provides evidence that this enrollment gap is not driven by negative selection (lower preferences for schooling) of the rural-urban migrants. This finding indicates that the real costs of secondary schooling are high for rural young who move to the cities, and suggests the opportunity of targeted skill and labor market policies for low-income families from rural areas.