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Career Migration, Self-selection and the Earnings of Married Men and Women in the Netherlands, 1981-93

Department for Health Services Research, National Institute of Public Health and the Environment, P O Box 1, 3720 BA Bilthoven, The Netherlands, jeroen.smits{at}rivm.nl

The relationship between career migration and earnings is studied for married men and women in the Netherlands. The hourly wages of married men and women who made a recent long-distance move are found to be higher than those of married men and women who did not move or who moved only over a small distance. This earning difference between migrants and non-migrants seems to be due completely to the fact that the migrants are a favourable self-selected group, both with regard to their measured characteristics and with regard to their unmeasured characteristics. If this favourable self-selection is taken into account, the male and female migrants turn out to earn significantly less than their non-migrating counterparts. For the males, this finding suggests that before the move they were in relatively unfavourable labour market situations compared with the non-migrants with the same measured and unmeasured characteristics. For the females, the negative effect of migration merely indicates that most long-distance moves are still made for the career of their husband.

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