Brazilian Review of Econometrics V 33, N 1, 2014
Juliano Assunção, Leandro Siqueira Carvalho.
The Roy model predicts that migrants will be disproportionately drawn from the lower
half of the educational distribution of the sending country if the sending country has
a higher return to schooling. However, Mexican immigrants in the U.S. tend to be
disproportionately drawn from the middle of the distribution. We argue that nancial
constraints may explain why. We study migrants' selectivity when agents that face credit
constraints make joint decisions about how much to invest in education and whether
to migrate. Our results show that nancial constraints can explain the intermediate
selection of migrants observed in the data.