# _Discussion_

Estimation results put forward in this section point to welfare gains of 58 percentage points due to outmigration, gains of 65 percentage points due to migration to urban destinations, and gains of 56 percent due to migration to rural destinations. The results also highlight a number of factors that determine which households would send out migrants, which household member would leave the household, and to which destination the member would migrate.

How do our results on welfare impact and factors for migration align with previous empirical findings? Similar poverty and migration studies demonstrated the positive welfare impact of migration as well as household-specific and individual-specific factors for migration. The findings from Beegle et al. (2011) in Tanzania strongly support our results. They uncovered a 36 percentage-point growth in consumption relative to staying, 18 to 27 percentage-point consumption growth for movers to rural areas, and 66 percentage-point consumption growth for movers to urban areas, which are very close to our impact estimates of 65 percentage points for urban migration. Ignoring the direction of the move, de Brauw et al. (2013) find even larger impacts, with migrants achieving 110 percent higher consumption than nonmigrants in Ethiopia.

Similar to other studies, our results also suggest that education matters for out-migration and consumption growth. While the average individual in our sample has completed just 5 years of schooling, we find that an additional year of schooling increases the incidence of out-migration by approximately 0.1 percent. Brockerhoff and Eu (1993) highlight evidence that educated females most likely migrate to cities. In their analysis, Beegle et al. (2011) also highlight the positive influence (with a convex effect) of individual education on migration and consumption. While our results focus primarily on individual educational attainment and do not account for the likely effect of the educational attainment of one’s biological parents ,they do not depart from the evidence from numerous poverty studies that a primary level of education adds little to consumption levels (Haughton and Khandker 2009).

Previous studies also examine the role of insurance versus investment as drivers for migration. For Kleemans (2015), migration may evolve as an ex-post risk coping strategy to survive in the face of negative income shocks or as an investment strategy to increase future expected income after facing liquidity constraints. Beegle et al. (2011) find that young people experiencing rainfall shocks migrate and that physical mobility is not associated with financial constraints. Though not testing financial access as an instrument for migration, our results indicate that, for those living far from regional capitals, a less costly move to a rural area is the only viable option.

Previous work further suggests a positive effect of networks on migration, thus supporting our finding that having a thin urban migrant network leads to rural rather than urban migration. Network relationships build upon social connections of kinship, friendship, and shared community origin to reduce the costs and risks associated with the movement, and increase the net expected gains from migration (Massey et al. 1993). Evidence of reliance on networks for lowering migration costs and risks largely exists 32