Essays on Internal Migration in Developing Countrie

This thesis investigates the determinants and implications of migration decisions made by individuals in households, using Indonesia as a case study. The thesis consists of two chapters. In each chapter I study respectively the effects of local recent flood events on individuals' and households' decision to leave their origin community, and the effects such migration decisions may have on subsequent health of migrant household members.;In chapter 2 of this dissertation, I quantify the effect of migration on subsequent health of migrants using a potential outcomes framework design that exploits exogenous impacts of floods on migration to reduce concerns regarding potential endogeneity of migration decisions. I focus on six often-used measurements of physical and general health that are potentially modifiable over short periods of time. I construct a latent class model of joint probabilities of the six health measures in which individuals are assumed to belong to one of two health classes: healthy or unhealthy. I estimate the model using data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey, an ongoing longitudinal survey of households and individuals in Indonesia. I find that migration last year has no effect on health, and that individuals who migrated two or more years ago as a result of a flood are 20 percent more likely to be in poor health than their non-migrant counterparts.;In chapter 3, I investigate the effects of recent local floods on probability of out-migration from affected communities. Using the dataset described above, I construct a 16-year panel to examine migration decision-making of individuals and households. I employ logistic modeling technique to find that individuals are six percentage points less likely to leave a community that has recently experienced a flood. Households residing in affected communities are eight percentage points less likely to send out at least one migrant following a flood. This result is important to individuals and policy-makers when directing disaster recovery efforts.;Chapter 2 is a joint work with Partha Deb, who originally proposed the project and provided research guidance. The execution of the project, including data cleaning, computation and interpretation of the results, and writing of the final draft of the paper are all mine.