Short-Term Migration and Children’s School Attendance: Evidence from Rural India

Abstract

Every year, millions of individuals from rural India migrate internally for short periods in search of employment. Temporary migration of parents can affect school attendance of children from these families. This study uses data from National Sample Survey Organisation’s (NSSO) Situation Assessment Survey 2013 to examine whether having a short-term migrant member in the family affects school attendance of children aged 6–10 years in rural India. An estimate from logit regression suggests that controlling for individual and family characteristics, village, district controls and NSSO state-region fixed effects, being from a migrant family reduces the probability that a child aged 6–10 years attends school by 15%. A series of robustness checks are done to ascertain the reliability of our finding. First, we assess the extent of potential omitted variable bias and find that our results remain unchanged even after controlling for bias. Second, we use instrumental variable approach since short-term migration of parents and school attendance of children can be driven by unobserved factors. In this method, the presence of a short-term migrant in the family is instrumented by lagged proportion of short-term migrants and lagged proportion of construction workers in the district. Our results remain robust to various specifications.