Intra-Household Migration Games in Rural Mexico
Early models of household decision-making assume that a household acts as a single decision-maker maximizing a single utility function. Since then, however, there has been a burgeoning literature modeling the household as a collection of individual agents with clearly delineated preferences and each making his or her own decisions. In these models, individual members of a household are connected through the sharing of public goods, through joint production technologies for producing public goods, through shared resource constraints, and through preferences. In this paper we study the strategic interactions that take place within households, and the resulting intra-household employment and schooling decisions in rural Mexico. In particular, we empirically analyze how an individual's migration, labor market participation, and schooling decisions are affected by their siblings' decisions, using instruments to address the endogeneity of siblings' decisions. (Work in progress.)