A key feature of the Philippine overseas migration is the increasing female migrants working outside their home. It is of interest that migrant women highly dominate overseas employment for the last decade who had to leave their homes and endure long years of family separation. The aim of this research was to determine how the migration of wives impacts the labor supply behavior or motivation to work of the husbands left behind.

To achieve this objective, I modeled husbands’ participation in the labor market activities using nationally representative merged dataset on labor force and family income surveys and correct for the endogeneity of the migration status of wives using migrant networks. Results show that stayer husbands significantly reduce their hours of work and shift from being permanent to short-term employed persons. The reduced labor supply of the stayer husbands could be associated with an increasing proportion of men becoming less economically active due to their participation in the household or family duties due to the absent-wives.

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Title: IS WIVES’ OVERSEAS MIGRATION A DETERRENT TO THE LABOR SUPPLY BEHAVIOR OF NON-MIGRANT SPOUSE LEFT-BEHIND? EVIDENCE FROM THE PHILIPPINES TEMPORARY MIGRATION
Researcher: Carl Rookie O. Daquio