who are absent (as they are currently overseas) but are expected to return. When family migration is not possible, and the rest of the family remains behind at origin, the surveys ask questions about the migrant to the family members.<sup>6</sup> Such modules are well suited to assess the impacts of temporary migration on family members left behind, especially spouses and children. These survey typically include detailed questions on various labor market, health, education, and consumption outcomes of household members.

When entire households migrate temporarily, however, absentee questions underestimate the incidence of temporary migration. In addition, since the questions asked in those modules are not asked directly to the migrants themselves, the data can be quite parsimonious or unreliable. Thus, it is typically restricted to the migrants’ demographic characteristics along with basic migration parameters such as year of departure, destination country and occupation.

The second way nationally-representative household surveys in origin countries collect information on temporary migration is through questions on past migration experiences of current household members. As these modules are part of nationally-representative surveys, they are especially well suited to carry out detailed comparisons between the labor market outcomes of return migrants and non-migrants. To estimate the causal impacts of past migration on outcomes back in the home country, the best data sets are those that collect information on both return migrants and current migrants, as they allow to account for the double selectivity of return migration, which can bias estimates of temporary migration impacts (Wahba 2015).<sup>7</sup> These data sets, however, differ in the level of detail of the information collected on current and return migrants. The Egypt Labor Market Surveys (ELMS) and Albania Living Standard and Measurement Surveys (LSMS) are the most comprehensive in that regard. One drawback of most returnee modules, however, is that they typically collect parsimonious information on past migration experience overseas. This prevents an in-depth analysis of the linkages between past migrant experience and current labor outcomes. In addition, the number of return migrants picked up by nationally-representative surveys in origin countries can be small if the incidence of temporary migration is limited, especially in surveys that restrict the recall period of past emigration episodes.<sup>8</sup>

> 6This is typically the case for low-skilled migrants who move to the Gulf States or to Southeast Asia.

> 7Available surveys of this kind include the Nepal Labor Force Survey (LFS) 2017/2018, the Albania Living Standard and Measurement Surveys (LSMS) 2005, 2008 and 2012 used by Piracha and Vadean (2010) and Carletto and Kilic (2011), the 2009 Nepal Migration survey, the 2017 Comprehensive Survey of the Migration of Armenia Population, the Egypt Labor Market Survey (ELMS) used by McCormick and Wahba (2001), McCormick and Wahba (2003), Wahba and Zenou (2012) and Wahba (2015), the Bangladesh Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) 2016 and the Listening to the Citizens of the Kyrgyz Republic 2021, among others.

> 8Some surveys ask whether the household member has ever lived abroad in the past 5 years, or, in some cases, in the past one year. Those surveys thus capture only a small number of returning temporary migrants.

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