brown bag Travail et Économie Publique

Du 28/11/2019 de 12:30 à 13:30

PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R2-21

FERNANDEZ-SANCHEZ Martin (PSE)

Mass Emigration and Human Capital over a Century: Evidence from the Galician Diaspora

Despite massive migration flows in the past century, their long-term consequences for the communities of origin remain largely unexplored. This paper examines the impact of mass emigration on human capital accumulation over a century. The context is the Galician diaspora, one of the greatest emigration episodes of the twentieth century in Europe. I combine newly-digitized data from multiple historical sources with contemporary administrative and survey data to build a unique database of all Galician municipalities from 1860 until the present. I use data on absent men as a novel proxy for emigration that I instrument by two sources of plausibly exogenous variation: pioneer emigration caused by extreme rainfall and the economic cycle in migrant destination countries. I find that while emigration depressed literacy rates at origin in the short run, one decade later the impact became positive and led to long-run gains in human capital that persist one hundred years later. I provide empirical evidence that these long-run effects are partly due to migrants' investments at origin and cultural change. Migrants financed the construction of hundreds of schools in their hometowns that subsequently raised educational attainment. Similarly, emigrants realized that education was of major importance and transmitted these norms back home, leading to a persistent change in beliefs about the value of education and effort.