completed lower secondary education as threshold. The hypothesis being that household heads with a higher educational level might benefit to a larger extent from migration due to the possibility of getting access to high-paying jobs or to more profitable business opportunities that require a higher skill level. Pooling together migrant households from Coastal and Inland Ghana leads to an estimated impact of migration slightly larger among household headed by someone with up to less than completed junior secondary education (the difference is about 2 percentage points). Breaking down the average coefficient for all Ghana into Coastal and Inland Ghana shows that the impact is statistically significant only among households originally from Inland Ghana and the impact is substantially larger among more educated heads. The differential increase on consumption level is estimated at about 27 percent.

We also test whether migration, a time-varying factor, is a driver of migration, in other words whether migration is the outcome of individuals’ effort to increase their educational level. If this is in fact the case, we might be measuring the gains of a migration-education bundle rather than migration in itself (Beegle et al., 2011). As we do not observe the same individual before and after the migration experience, the best we can do is to restrict the analysis to individuals that migrated when they were not simply out of school but also in an age range that makes unlikely any return to school desks. We re-run our analysis on a sample of migrant household heads aged 30 or above at the time of migration and of non-migrant heads aged 30 or above at the time of the survey. The results are significant and very similar to the main estimates indicating that our results are robust to this threat.<sup>17</sup> In addition to estimating the effect of migration on current consumption levels, we construct a measure capturing the distance in terms of consumption from the national poverty line. This distance, reported as a fraction of the consumption level and set to zero for households above the poverty threshold, is an indicator of the resources needed to bring an average poor household to the level of the poverty line. As it is unlikely that migration _per se_ is able to bring households out of poverty, the distance from the poverty line is meant to estimates the extent to which migration can improve the livelihood of those living below the poverty line. Our estimates, reported in Table 8, indicate that overall migration reduces the gap by about 11 percentage points, with no economically significant differential impact by year of migration. The coefficients is also similar among migrant households from Coastal and Inland Ghana: on average it is about 18 percentage points among the first, and 16 percentage points among the latter.

# 5 Concluding Remarks

This paper investigates the impact of internal migration on household welfare in Ghana. We make use of the most recent nationally representative household survey conducted in 2012/13 and controlling for region of origin and adopting an inter-regional definition of migration, we identify the impact of migration on the consumption level of households that migrated relative to

> 17 Results are available upon request.

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