Hostname: page-component-54dcc4c588-dbm8p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-02T09:03:52.603Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

International migration and the gender wage gap

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2021

Raymundo M. Campos-Vazquez Open the ORCID record for Raymundo M. Campos-Vazquez [Opens in a new window]  and
Jaime Lara Open the ORCID record for Jaime Lara [Opens in a new window]
Raymundo M. Campos-Vazquez*
Affiliation:
Centro de Estudios Económicos, El Colegio de México, Camino al Ajusco 20, Col. Pedregal de Santa Teresa, Mexico City 10740, Mexico
Jaime Lara
Affiliation:
División de Negocios, Universidad de Monterrey, Av. Ignacio Morones Prieto 4500 Pte., San Pedro Garza García, N.L. 66238, Mexico
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: rmcampos@colmex.mx
Get access

Abstract

This article analyzes the effect of international migration on the wage gap between women and men who remain in Mexico. We use historical distance to the U.S. border over early twentieth-century railroad networks as an exogenous factor causing changes in the relative supply of men and women, due to predominately male migration. A 10% decrease in the relative labor supply of men tends to increase the wage gap between women and men by approximately 1.1 percentage points, suggesting that they are not perfect substitutes. However, the results imply a greater elasticity of substitution between men and women than that suggested by previous studies.

Keywords

Gender gaplabor demandMexican migrationJ01J16J23J82O54

Information

Type
Research Paper
Information
Journal of Demographic Economics , Volume 87 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 213 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Acemoglu, Daron, Autor, David H. and Lyle, David (2004) Women, war, and wages: the effect of female labor supply on the wage structure at midcentury. Journal of Political Economy 112, 497–551.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aguayo-Tellez, Ernesto, Airola, Jim and Juhn, Chinhui (2010) Did trade liberalization help women? The case of Mexico in the 1990s. NBER Working Paper 16195. doi: 10.3386/w16195CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amuedo-Dorantes, Catalina and Pozo, Susan (2006) Migration, remittances, and male and female employment patterns. American Economic Review 96, 222–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aydemir, Abdurrahman and Borjas, George J. (2006) A comparative analysis of the labor market impact of international migration: Canada, Mexico, and the United States. NBER Working Paper 12327. doi: 10.3386/w12327.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Azmat, Ghazala and Petrongolo, Barbara (2014) Gender and the labor market: what have we learned from field and lab experiments? Labour Economics 30, 32–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beaudry, Paul and Lewis, Ethan (2014) Do male-female wage differentials reflect differences in the return to skill? Cross-city evidence from 1980–2000. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 6, 178–194.Google Scholar
Bertrand, Marianne, Duflo, Esther and Mullainathan, Sendhil (2004) How much should we trust differences-in-differences estimates? Quarterly Journal of Economics 119, 249–275.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Binzel, Christine and Assaad, Ragui (2011) Egyptian men working abroad: labor supply responses by the women left behind. Labor Economics 18, 98–114.10.1016/j.labeco.2011.03.002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blau, Francine D. and Kahn, Lawrence M. (2017) The gender wage gap: extent, trends, and explanations. Journal of Economic Literature 55, 789–865.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Colin, Gelbach, Jonah B. and Miller, Douglas L. (2008) Bootstrap-based improvements for inference with clustered errors. The Review of Economics and Statistics 90, 414–427.10.1162/rest.90.3.414CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campos-Vázquez, Raymundo M., Hincapié, Andrés and Rojas-Váldes, Ruben Irvin (2012) Family income inequality and the role of married females earnings in Mexico: 1988–2010. Latin American Journal of Economics 49, 67–98.Google Scholar
Coatsworth, John H. (1979) Indispensable railroads in a backward economy: the case of Mexico. Journal of Economic History 39, 939–960.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conover, Emily, Khamis, Melanie and Pearlman, Sarah (2015) Missing men and female labor market outcomes: evidence from large scale Mexican migration. Working Paper. sites.middlebury.edu/ehrgc/files/2015/04/Pearlman.docx.Google Scholar
De Giorgi, Giacomo, Paccagnella, Marco and Pellizzari, Michele (2015) Gender complementarities in the labor market. In Polachek, Solomon W., Tatsiramos, Konstantinos and Zimmermann, Klaus F. (eds.), Gender Convergence in the Labor Market (Research in Labor Economics, Volume 41), pp. 277–298. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demirgüç-Kunt, Asli, López Córdova, Ernesto, Martínez Pería, María Soledad and Woodruff, Christopher (2011) Remittances and banking sector breadth and depth: evidence from Mexico. Journal of Development Economics 95, 229–241.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Durand, Jorge, Massey, Douglas S. and Zenteno, René M. (2001) Mexican immigration to the United States: continuities and changes. Latin American Research Review 36, 107–127.Google ScholarPubMed
Freire, Tiago (2011) The impact of migration on the gender wage gap. National University of Singapore Working Paper. http://www.sole-jole.org/12267.pdf.Google Scholar
Hanson, Gordon H. (2007a) Emigration, labor supply, and earnings in Mexico. In Borjas, G. J. (ed.), Mexican Immigration to the United States. United States: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 289–328.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanson, Gordon H. (2007b) Emigration, remittances and labor force participation in Mexico. INTAL Working Paper No. 1456, Inter-American Development Bank, INTAL. https://publications.iadb.org/handle/11319/2637.Google Scholar
Kan, Sopia and Emre Aytimur, R. (2019) Labor force participation of women left behind in Tajikistan. Oxford Development Studies 47, 1–28.Google Scholar
Massey, Douglas S., Fischer, Mary J. and Capoferro, Chiara (2006) International migration and gender in Latin America: a comparative analysis. International Migration 44, 63–91.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Massey, Douglas S., Rugh, Jacob S. and Pren, Karen A. (2010) The geography of undocumented Mexican migration. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 26, 129–153.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McKenzie, David and Rapoport, Hillel (2011) Can migration reduce educational attainment? Evidence from Mexico. Journal of Population Economics 24, 1331–1358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendola, Mariapia and Carletto, Calogero (2012) Migration and gender differences in the home labour market: evidence from Albania. Labour Economics 19, 870–880.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mishra, Prachi (2007) Emigration and wages in source countries: evidence from Mexico. Journal of Development Economics 82, 180–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olivetti, Claudia and Petrongolo, Barbara (2014) Gender gaps across countries and skills: demand, supply, and the industry structure. Review of Economic Dynamics 17, 842–859.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Qian, Nancy (2008) Missing women and the price of tea in China: the effect of sex-specific earnings on sex imbalance. Quarterly Journal of Economics 123, 1251–1285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raphael, Steven (2013) International migration, sex ratios, and the socioeconomic outcomes of nonmigrant Mexican women. Demography 50, 971–991.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sanderson, Eleanor and Windmeijer, Frank (2016) A weak instrument F-test in linear IV models with multiple endogenous variables. Journal of Econometrics 190, 212–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Secretaria de Desarrollo Social (SEDESOL), Consejo Nacional de Población (CONAPO), and Instituto Nacional de Geografía e Informática (INEGI) (2004) Delimitación de zonas metropolitanas 2000. http://www.conapo.gob.mx/en/CONAPO/Zonas_metropolitanas_2000.Google Scholar
UN-DESA and OECD (2013) World migration figures. Paper presented at the United Nations High-Level Dialogue on Migration and Development, New York, 3–4 October 2013. http://www.oecd.org/els/mig/World-Migration-in-Figures.pdf.Google Scholar
UNDP (2013) Human Development Report 2013. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/14/hdr2013_en_complete.pdf.Google Scholar
Wang, Qing (2018) Male migration and female labor market attachment: new evidence from the Mexican family life survey. International Migration Review 52, 66–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weeks, John R., Stoler, J. and Jankowski, P. (2011) Who's crossing the border: new data on undocumented immigrants to the United States. Population, Space and Place 17, 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weinstein, Amanda L. (2017) Working women in the city and urban wage growth in the United States. Regional Science 57, 591–610.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
World Economic Forum (2014) The Global Gender Gap Report 2014. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GGGR14/GGGR_CompleteReport_2014.Google Scholar