PMMA-12415 Youth self-employment in households receiving remittances in Macedonia

Abstract

The objective of this study is to investigate whether youth in households receiving remittances in Macedonia have a higher probability of establishing their own business. In addition, we investigated whether the effect of remittances on youth labor supply is homogenous across the genders and across ethnic and rural/urban divides. We used the DotM 2008 Remittance Survey and the instrumental variables approach to address the potential endogeneity of remittances with respect to the self-employment status. Two instrumental variables were used which affect remittances, but not the decision to be self-employed, except through remittances: a non-economic motive to migrate, and the existence of migrants’ network. Moreover, we overcome some of the deficiencies of the IV estimation by applying the Roodman’s conditional mixed-process (CMP) estimator. Results robustly suggest that youth in households which receive remittances have considerably larger probability of establishing their own business, ranging between 28% and 33%, compared to their non-youth non-receiving counterparts. The main policy recommendation is that the Macedonian government should start devising a strategy for channeling remitted money into more productive use, especially converting those funds into jobs for youth.

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Members

Project leader: Nikica Mojsoska-Blazevski

Project researchers: Marjan Petreski | Maja Ristovska | Edi Smokvarski

Scientific mentors: Paola Ballon | Guy Lacroix

Journal publication

Authors	Co-Authors	Title of paper	Title of Economic Review	Bibliographic references
Marjan Petreski	Nikica Mojsoska-blazevski	Youth self-employment in households receiving remittances in Macedonia	Czech Journal of Economics and Finance	Volume 65, Issue 6 (Dec 2015), pp. 499-523

Working Papers

	Title	Modified	Size	Comments	Recommendations
	Youth self-employment in households receiving remittances in Macedonia	2014-11-10	2452.61KB	0	1

Policy Briefs

	Title	Modified	Size	Comments	Recommendations
	Youth self-employment in households receiving remittances in Macedonia	2014-11-10	873.06KB	0	0

Final report

	Title	Modified	Size	Comments	Recommendations
		2014-09-10	861.33KB	0	1

Proposal

	Title	Modified	Size	Comments	Recommendations
	Youth self-employment in households receiving remittances in Macedonia	2013-06-30	1173KB	1	1