The effect of education on internal migration of young men and women: incidence, timing, and type of migration

Abstract

We take advantage of a major compulsory schooling reform in Turkey to provide novel evidence on the causal effect of education on both the incidence and timing of internal migration. In addition, we provide causal effects of education on different types of migration. We find that education substantially increases the incidence of ever-migrating by the mid-20 s for men but not for women. However, using a dataset that comprises complete migration histories, including the reason for each migration, we show that women become more likely to migrate at earlier ages, and their migration reasons change. Women become more likely to move for human capital investments and employment purposes and less likely to be tied-movers.