Family Migration and Labor Force Outcomes: Sex Differences in Occupational Context

Empirical analyses of sex differences in the career consequences of family migration have focused on adjudicating between the human capital and the gender-role explanations but have ignored the potential influence of gender inequality in the structure of the labor market. In this paper we estimate conditional difference-in-difference models with individual-, family- and occupation-level data to test a structural explanation that attributes sex differences in the returns to family migration to occupational sex segregation. Despite using measures of relevant occupational characteristics and occupational fixed effects, our results do not support the structural explanation. Instead, the results add to the body of empirical evidence that is consistent with the gender-role explanation of sex differences in the experience of family migration.