Intra-Household Bargaining and Migration

Yu-hsuan Su, University of Washington

For a family, the incidence and timing of migration can be related to various factors and are often analyzed in the unitary household utility maximization framework. Migration can potentially be affected by intra-household bargaining, which has been applied to location decisions of spouses in more developed economies. Among different patterns of migration, split migration describes the case where part of the household, usually one of the married couple, migrates first, and then the rest of the household joins later. Split migration has received relatively limited attention in the literature, but it consists of a non-negligible part of the population. Understanding the dynamics of split migration can help understand how the whole population will evolve and eventually shed light on policies. I use detailed migration data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) to describe the migration pattern in Indonesia and examine the relationship between split migration and potential influencing factors.