Who Leaves and Who Returns? Deciphering Immigrant Self-Selection from a Developing Country

Existing research examining the self-selection of immigrants suffers from a lack of information on the immigrants’ labor force activities in the home country, quotas limiting who is allowed to enter the destination country, and non-economic factors such as internal civil strife in the home country. Using a novel data set from the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), a migration flow to the U.S. has been analyzed that suffers from none of these problems. Second, nearest neighbor matching for immigrants has been conducted prior to their leaving the home country using home country wages as the outcome variable to determine the nature of selection on unobservable characteristics. [Discussion Paper No. 3268]