How Does Adult Child Migration Affect the Health of Elderly Parents Left Behind? Evidence from Mexico

Abstract

This paper considers whether the health of elderly parents is adversely affected by the international migration of their children. Estimation of a causal effect is complicated by the fact that children may migrate in response to a parent's health status and there may be other unobserved factors influencing both parental health and child migration. I address this endogeneity problem by using instrumental variables methods where I instrument for having a child in the U.S. with the sex and married ratios of the children of the elderly respondents. To ensure the instruments are not influencing elderly health directly, I include children's contributions to their parents in the analysis. I also perform falsification tests which support the view that the causal mechanism is operating through children's migration. Overall, the evidence suggests that having a child migrate to the U.S. raises the probability that the elderly parent in Mexico will be in poor physical health. I conclude by exploring the possibility that the deleterious effects of children's migration on mental health are driving this relationship.