Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Migration, Entrepreneurship and Social Capital

By J. Wahba, Yves Zenou. Social Science Research Network, 2012

257 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether return migrants are more likely to become entrepreneurs than non-migrants. We develop a theoretical search model that puts forward the trade off faced by returnees since overseas migration provides an opportunity for human and physical capital accumulation but, at the same time, may lead to a loss of social capital back home. We test the predictions of the model using data from Egypt. We find that, even after controlling for the endogeneity of the temporary migration decision, an overseas returnee is more likely to become an entrepreneur than a non-migrant. Although migrants may lose their social capital, they accumulate savings and experience overseas that increase their chances of becoming entrepreneurs.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cb3b787eff5bb8b20792536ba435f4fedf7fae39

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Citations in the corpus

Bringing It All Back Home – Return Migration and Fertility Choices (2015, methodology): “We tackle the threat to identification posed by the endogeneity of the decision to migrate following Wahba and Zenou (2009), who rely on the fluctuations in the real price of oil to obtain an exogenous source of variability in the probability to migrate.”
Migration, Knowledge Diffusion and the Comparative Advantage of Nations (2018, unknown): “G Including Hausmann and Klinger (2007) Density Variable Table A8 presents results which include as control the “density” of the country in the product at the beginning of the period.”
Migration, entrepreneurship and development: critical questions (2017, background): “Their evidence indicates that return migrants could indeed be more likely to become self-employed; however, they do recognize that the decision of a migrant to return could be a decision made simultaneously to that of becoming an entrepreneur, which would upwardly bias the propensity of return migra”
Return migrants: The rise of new entrepreneurs in rural China (2010, background): “…1979; Lucas, 1978; Schultz, 1990, Evans & Jovanovic, 1989; Rees & Shah, 1986), family (or parental) characteristics (Mohapatra et al., 2007; Wahba & Zenou, 2009), institutional factors such as access to credit and liquidity constraint (Blanchflower & Oswald, 1998; Evans & Leighton, 1989),…”