# **1. Introduction**

There is a general consensus that international labor migration entails large socio-economic changes in source communities. At the same time, there is an intimate and unexplored relationship between gender aspects of migration, such as male-dominated migration, and economic development in countries of origin. This paper addresses this issue by looking at the impact of international migration on labor supply by gender in such a setting as Albania, where male-migration is an ordinary and widespread phenomenon.

Most studies of the impact of migration on source households have overlooked that expanding opportunities for migration will have a different effect on behavioral patterns across household members left behind, beyond increasing the amount of income received by the family (see Chen 2006 for an exception). The economic impact of migration on non-migrant employment patterns has been documented for a few developing economies (Funkhouser, 1992; Tiongson, 2001; Amuedo-Dorantes and Pozo, 2006) but while much of the focus has been on the income effect of remittances, less attention has been paid to the role of (male) migration in shifting (female) decision-making power in the family at origin. Theoretical analysis suggests that due to imperfect monitoring on the one hand, and increase in the household income (through remittances) on the other, male migration may lead to women bargaining empowerment in the control and allocation of resources at origin - so that gender differentials in labor supply may be observed (Chen 2006, Lundberg and Pollak, 1993, Haddad et al. 1997).

We consider this question by analyzing differences in labor market outcomes across men and women in Albania according to their family exposure to international migration. Over the last 15 years this country has experienced massive migrant outflows, mainly to Greece and Italy, driven by economic hardships during the transition process and fostered by geographic proximity. While we have some insights into the welfare impact of migration and remittances on average household income and investment at origin (MacCarthy et al., 2007; Zezza et al. 2005), little is known about the effects on the local labor market behavior by gender. There is some evidence on the labor market performance of return migrants in Albania (De Coulon and Piracha, 2003) but an unexplored issue if whether the maledominated nature of Albanian international migration affects the economic performance of women left behind.

Based on unusually detailed data on household migration status of current and former household members from the 2005 Albania Living Standards Measurement Survey, this study provides new empirical evidence on the gender differential in the home-labor-market impact of heterogeneous family migration exposure. Following Amuedo-Dorantes and Pozo, (2006), we further distinguish between paid and unpaid work, in order to test whether the ‘quality’ of women’s work varies according to the migration status of their household and at the same time, to account for the important role played by the informal sector in (female) employment outcomes in developing economies. Since households are likely to self-select into sending migrants abroad based in part on unobserved characteristics, we use an 2