Mass Involuntary Migration and Educational Outcomes

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of large scale forced migration on educational attainment of individuals who were in the school going age when they were forced to migrate. When British left the colonized Indian subcontinent in 1947, two independent states were created: India and Pakistan. Millions of individuals found themselves on the wrong side of the border leading to mass scale violence and migration. I rely on a differences-in-differences approach to establish the causality of the estimates. Using Pakistan's Census data from 1973, I first show that educational outcomes between migrants and natives do not differ for individuals who were out of school going age in 1947. I subsequently show that individuals of school going age, who were born in India and migrated to Pakistan, have a higher likelihood to attain more education than their native counterparts. This is despite the fact that these young migrants and their families were suddenly displaced and immigrated into a newly found country with limited resources at its disposal. These results are driven by a higher value being placed on education and an access to better educational environment.