Bringing It All Back Home – Return Migration and Fertility Choices

Return migration exerts a wide-ranging influence upon the countries of origin of the migrants. We analyze whether returnees adjust their fertility choices to the norms that prevail in their previous countries of destination using Egyptian household-level data. Egyptian men migrate predominantly toward other Arab countries characterized by a higher number of children per woman. Relying on a two-step instrumental variable approach to control for the endogeneity of the migration decisions, we show that return migration has a positive and significant influence on marital childbearing.