TY  - JOUR
TI  - Migrants’ Location Choice: The Role of Migration Experience
T2  - HSE Economic Journal 
IS  - HSE Economic Journal 
KW  - labor migration
KW  - international migration
KW  - destination choice
KW  - location choice
KW  - Tajikistan
KW  - Russia
AB  - In this paper, we study how household’s migration experience affects migrants’ current choice of location within a single receiving country. Unlike most of previous research on migrants’ location choice, we analyze the case of temporary repeated migrations. We focus on two aspects of the effect of migration experience. First, we aim to identify history dependence that might exist in migrants’ destination choices. Second, we show how this history dependence and general migration experience influence the importance of regions’ economic characteristics: average wage and unemployment rate. To do this we employ 2007 and 2009 rounds of Tajikistan Living Standards Survey. Panel structure of the data set allows us to distinguish between new and repeated migrants and to control for households’ migration experience in 2007 while analyzing 2009 migrants’ location choices. We find considerable path dependence in destination choices by Tajik migrants. Previously chosen destination that were associated with higher wages and employment opportunities largely define the current ones. We also find that migration experience, both general and at specific destination, reduces the importance of receiving regions’ economic characteristics on location choice. In particular, after controlling for the migration history, wages and unemployment rate at the destination turn out to have less or no effect on migrants’ location choice. In addition, the effect of regional economic characteristics on the destination choices for new migrants is higher than for repeated.
AU  - Evgenia Chernina
UR  - https://ej.hse.ru/en/2016-20-1/179157332.html
PY  - 2016
SP  - 100-128
VL  - 20