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Demography

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02-10-2017

Compulsory Schooling Laws and Migration Across European Countries

Authors: Ainhoa Aparicio Fenoll, Zoë Kuehn

Published in: Demography | Issue 6/2017

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Abstract

Educational attainment is a key factor for understanding why some individuals migrate and others do not. Compulsory schooling laws, which determine an individual’s minimum level of education, can potentially affect migration. We test whether and how increasing the length of compulsory schooling influences migration of affected cohorts across European countries, a context where labor mobility is essentially free. We construct a novel database that includes information for 31 European countries on compulsory education reforms passed between 1950 and 1990. Combining this data with information on recent migration flows by cohorts, we find that an additional year of compulsory education reduces the number of individuals from affected cohorts who migrate in a given year by 9 %. Our results rely on the exogeneity of compulsory schooling laws. A variety of empirical tests indicate that European legislators did not pass compulsory education reforms as a reaction to changes in emigration rates or educational attainment.

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EU law guarantees free labor mobility, but countries can impose temporary restrictions for nationals of new member states. Prior to 2014, some EU member states required that Bulgarian and Romanian nationals obtained residence and work permits. Norway and Liechtenstein belong to the Schengen area, which has guaranteed free mobility since 2001 and 2011, respectively. Croatia joined the EU only in 2014. Macedonia is an EU candidate country, and since 2009, its residents can travel visa-free to the Schengen area.

For instance, Canada and Australia use a point system that grants visas to more-skilled and higher-educated individuals; see Aydemir (2011) for an analysis of the selection effects of such systems.

Linguists identify at least seven European language families: Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Baltic-Slavik, Greek, Uralic, and Semitic (see Gray and Atkinson 2003; Harding and Sokal 1988).

For instance, Brunello et al. (2009) provided evidence for a number of European countries for which compulsory schooling laws significantly affect educational attainment for all but the upper part of the education distribution.

Using data on educational attainment entails problems of reverse causality if individuals’ education choices are influenced by their desire to migrate. For instance, McKenzie and Rapoport (2011) found that Mexican boys from a household with international migration experience are more likely to drop out of school.

Regarding a related outcome variable—immigrant assimilation—and using an analysis similar to the current article, Lleras-Muney and Shertzer (2015) considered changes in education policies, including compulsory schooling laws and the imposition of English as language of instruction. The authors found no effect of these policies on migrant assimilation in the United States between 1910 and 1930.

Quinn and Rubb (2005) proposed to reconcile these different findings by looking at education-occupation matches. They found that individuals who work in occupations that require less education are more likely to migrate, while the opposite is true for individuals whose level of education is below that required for their occupation. Alternatively, McKenzie and Rapoport (2010) found that the selection effect along educational lines regarding Mexican-U.S. migration depends on the size of networks, with larger (smaller) networks attracting disproportionately more-uneducated (educated) individuals.

For countries where students can choose among foreign languages, we consider all options for two reasons. First, for most of these countries, we do not have information on languages chosen by each cohort. Second, we wish to avoid measuring individual choices, which would turn foreign languages into a bad control. Limited reliability of data on years of exposure to foreign language classes is the main reason why we do not consider such a refinement.

Russian is the most widely taught second foreign language in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, but we ignore this option given that we do not have data on migration flows to Russia. Although individuals in Finland and Belgium can additionally study Swedish and Dutch, respectively, we do not include these options explicitly given that they apply to all cohorts and are hence indistinguishable from country fixed effects. The same holds true for any controls accounting for the fact that some countries—such as the UK and Ireland, or Germany and Austria—share the same official language.

When in place, these restrictions applied to individuals of all ages.

For 2007–2013, the EU allocated €3.1 billion to the Erasmus program.

One potential concern could be that individuals did not obtain their schooling in their country of origin. However, using data by citizenship, instead of country of previous residence, mitigates this concern substantially.

Unfortunately, we cannot exploit changes over time because these data are available only every five years. Barro and Lee (2013) provided data for all countries in our sample except for Liechtenstein.

We use the following editions: 1952, 1954, 1957, 1959, 1962, 1966, 1968, 1970, 1977, 1985, 1989, and 1996. For Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia, we use data for Yugoslavia that are available for 1956–1977. For the Czech Republic and Slovakia, data for Czechoslovakia are used until 1992. Because no data on emigration from the USSR are available, we cannot assign data to Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania. Data for Bulgaria, Romania, and Liechtenstein are only sporadically available, and numbers for emigration flows from Ireland exceed those of the Irish population; hence, we do not include any of these countries. For Spain, Norway, Finland, and the UK, data before 1962, before 1960, for 1960–1966, and for 1961–1963, respectively, could not be used because they included only intercontinental migration in the case of Spain; excluded migration to other Scandinavian countries; or in the case of the UK, referred only to migration to other Commonwealth countries.

Aggregate migration outflow data are available for 24 countries from 1950–1995, but data for all other control variables are not available for Macedonia, and for all other countries only from 1960 onward. The final sample for the exogeneity check includes the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.

Running a 2SLS IV estimation with data for 2010 only results in a negative and significant estimate of the impact of education on migration. However, because of the reduced sample size, the instrument is weak according to the Stock and Yogo (2005) criterion. Furthermore, as mentioned in the Introduction, it is not clear that compulsory schooling reforms affect migration only via educational attainment, something that would invalidate the exclusion restriction.

The presence of network effects could imply that as more individuals leave, more follow. However bear in mind that unlike the literature’s typical example regarding Mexican-U.S. migration, the stock of immigrants in our case is spread over 30 countries. The negative coefficient is in line with the notion that after a large fraction of an age group has migrated, those who remain have a much lower propensity to leave.

To our knowledge, the only example of a government explicitly providing training such that its citizens become better migrant workers is the training of nurses in the Philippines (see Lorenzo et al. 2007). However, the effect of such specialized training of adult workers on migration is much more immediate than the one resulting from education reforms regarding compulsory schooling.

Opposition tended to arise because of limitations to child labor and parental freedom of decision, as well as taxation for financing schools; see Eisenberg (1988) and Butts and Cremin (1953).

To the best of our knowledge, no established theory in political economy addresses education reforms. However, increasing the length of compulsory education requires additional resources, such as teachers and facilities. Thus, the actual implementation of those reforms depends on the availability of resources.

Alternative explanations for the low European mobility focus on relatively high unemployment benefits (Antolin and Bover 1997) and stronger employment protection (Belot 2007) in European countries compared with the United States.

Boldrin and Canova (2001) argued that EU policies aimed at achieving convergence in economic conditions across Europe seem to discourage migration.

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Title: Compulsory Schooling Laws and Migration Across European Countries
Authors: Ainhoa Aparicio Fenoll
Zoë Kuehn
Publication date: 02-10-2017
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Demography / Issue 6/2017
Print ISSN: 0070-3370
Electronic ISSN: 1533-7790
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-017-0615-x

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