Returns to International Migration: Evidence from a Bangladesh-Malaysia Visa Lottery

The migrant’s absence pauses demographic changes (marriage, childbirth, household formation), and shifts decision-making power towards females. Migration removes enterprising individuals, lowering household entrepreneurship, but does not crowd out other family members’ labor supply. One group of applicants were offered deferred migration that never materialized. Improved migration prospects induce premigration investments in skills that generate no returns in the domestic market.

Join us for a talk by Prof Mushfiq Mubarak (Yale) on the effects of receiving a Malaysian work visa, on Bangladeshi workers and their families. He and his co-authors follow 3,512 (of 1.4 million) applicants to a government lottery that randomly allocated visas to Bangladeshis for low-skilled, temporary labor contracts in Malaysia. Most lottery winners migrate, and their remittance substantially raises their family’s standard of living in Bangladesh.  
 

About the Panelist:

Mushfiq Mobarak, Professor of Economics, Yale

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is a Professor of Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics. Mobarak is the founder and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE), and holds appointments at Innovations for Poverty Action, the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, the International Growth Centre (IGC) at LSE. 

Mobarak conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare improving. He also examines the complexities of scaling up development interventions that are proven effective in such trials. His research has been published in journals across disciplines, including Econometrica, Science, The Review of Economic Studies, the American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.