For Children's Sake: Intergenerational Altruism and Parental Migration Intentions

While economic research has extensively studied the consequences of migration on children, we advance that having (or intention to have) ospring may constitute a reason to move per se. Exploiting individual-level data, this paper investigates to what extent the perceived lack of child well-being fosters parental migration intentions. Taking advantage of a large survey, the Gallup World Poll, which covers 23 Latin American and Caribbean countries between the years 2009 and 2015, we show that the perception of poor opportunities for children in one's own country is an important push factor in the parental intention to migrate internationally, besides the other individual determinants of the decision to move abroad. The magnitude and robustness of the estimate are examined by running a battery of tests. Furthermore, with the goal of tackling the potential endogeneity issues, for a subset of countries, we exploit the region of residence and the date of the interview of respondents and we instrument individual perceptions of child well-being with the timing and location of Catholic clergy scandals concerning the sexual abuse of minors.