The dynamics of return migration, human capital accumulation, and wage assimilation

This paper studies the link between anticipated migration durations and immigrants’ behavior. We develop a lifecycle model in which immigrants decide labor market participation, consumption, and investment in location-specific human capital together with the optimal length of migration. We estimate this model combining several data sets that provide unique repeated information on immigrants’ return intentions and realized return migrations. We show that the relation between return intentions and human capital investment leads to behavior-based selective return migration, and analyze how policies which influence migrants’ return decisions affect immigrants’ career profiles.