# 1 Introduction

Temporary economic migration is undertaken in large part by relatively low skilled households as a mechanism to diversify income risk and reduce resource constraints.<sup>1</sup> This aspect of the migration decision is evident in the sheer volume of remittances sent back by migrants to their families of origin. In agricultural settings, where households face considerable exposure to uninsured income risk and often undertake costly strategies to avert or cope with such risk,<sup>2</sup> such migration induced resource fl ows should translate into better risk bearing capacity for those left behind.

In this paper we take up this question by asking whether economic migration allows households in sending communities to avoid costly risk coping strategies. We focus on early child growth since there is considerable epidemiological evidence that very young children are particularly vulnerable to shocks that lead to growth faltering, with substantial longterm health consequences.<sup>3</sup> Recent work on the intra-household allocation of resources and risk has also shown that gender differences in the relative burden of risk may be important,<sup>4</sup> and that the allocation of resources to daughters is often one margin along which poor households adjust to uninsurable transitory income shocks.<sup>56</sup> This suggests that the opportunity to migrate would confer special bene fi ts to girls in origin households. In particular, risk sensitive outcomes for girls in migrant households should improve to a disproportionate degree, as compared to boys, in the same households. Speci fi cally, it suggests that the difference in growth outcomes for girls in migrant households, as compared to their counterparts

> 1 Migration reduces risk by allowing some household members to move into a sector or market where earnings are either negatively correlated or orthogonal to earnings in the local economy. Both the migrant and the family left behind clearly stand to gain from this risk-sharing. See Stark and Levhari (1982) and Stark and Bloom (1985) for early work on this.

> 2 See, for example, Townsend(1995), Morduch(1995), Udry (1990), Fafchamps Udry and Czukas (1998), Kochar (1998) and Jacoby and Skou fi as (1997).

> 3 Martorell ((1995), (1999)) and Martorell et. al. (1994), for example, have shown that stature by age three is strongly correlated with attained body size in adulthood. Indeed, it appears that from age 3 onwards children, even from very poor families, basically grow at the same rate as children in developed economies. The long term consequences of nutritional shocks at a young age are thus likely to be very substantial.

> 4 Hoddinott and Kinsey (2001), Foster(1995).

> 5 Rose (1999), Dercon and Krishnan(2000), Das Gupta (1987), Rosenzweig and Schultz (1982), Behrman (1988), and Behrman and Deolalikar(1990).

> 6 There is some evidence on morbidity and health facility usage in Pakistan that is consistent with this. The World Bank’s Country Gender Assessment for Pakistan (2005) shows that girls in poorer households are signi fi cantly less likely to use health care facilities than boys in the same households, using nationally representative data (the Pakistan Integrated Household Survey (2001)).

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