Education, male gender preference and migrants' remittances: Interactions in rural Morocco Jamal Bouoiyour a, ⁎, Amal Miftah b , El Mouhoub Mouhoud b a University of Pau, CATT, France b Paris Sciences et Lettres, Paris-Dauphine University, LEDa, DIAL UMR 225, FR-75016 Paris, France abstract article info Article history: Accepted 21 October 2015 Available online xxxx The paper seeks to analyze the relationship between migrants' remittances and educational attendance in rural areas of southern Morocco. We perform a probit model to assess whether children who live in recipient house- holds are more likely to attend school than their counterparts in other types of households. We find that the re- ceipt of remittances has a significant positive effect on school attendance, especially for boys. The findings may be of interest to other developing countries and to the relevant policy makers, as the results suggest that migrants' remittance may serve as a channel for investing in human capital in such recipient countries and that the gains are much greater for boys, contributing to higher gender inequalities in access to education in rural areas. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Education International migration Probit model Morocco 1. Introduction It is well known that the education plays a crucial role in socio- economic development of countries. It has become a major concern for national policymakers and various international organizations (UNESCO, UNDP, etc.). The United Nations Development Program (PNUD) has since 1990 introduced Human Development Index (HDI) that measures the progress made by the countries in human develop- ment, by taking into account the essential dimensions of well-being such as the education and literacy levels. In this context, in many devel- oping countries, governments have opted for a multidimensional ap- proach when developing anti-poverty and human development strategies, combining income support and job creation with expanded access to healthcare and education. This real trend has been accompa- nied by a substantial interest by the micro-economics literature to em- pirically investigate the factors that shape household expenditure patterns and specifically households' schooling decisions. On the household-level, early researches on the determinants of education have placed a particular emphasis on the role of family characteristics such as the level of education and income on schooling decisions. They are, not surprisingly, very interested in the economic benefits of education measured in terms of rate of return to education, i.e. parents invest in the education and skills of their own children because such in- vestment is presumed to generate a higher rate of return than the return on savings (Becker, 1993). Of course, parents in low-income and impoverished households invest too little in their own children because it seems difficult to finance educational investments regardless of such returns. In other words, families financially constrained cannot bear the expenses related to the education of their children. This indicates that reduction of these constraints will make access to education possi- ble for poorer (Bredl, 2011; Grootaert, 1999) and rural people (Edmonds, 2006 1 ). In this regard, financial transfers from public sector and other family members can encourage parents to invest in the edu- cation of their children. 2 By providing an additional and predictable support, they can have a decisive influence on educational outcomes. Recently, there has been a growing number of studies that have metic- ulously analyzed the development impact of migrants' remittances along various dimensions, including education, poverty, inequality, growth, financial development and investment (see Adams and Cuecuecha, 2010; Ahmed et al., 2011; Beyene, 2014; Bouoiyour and Miftah, 2014; Coulibaly, 2015; Driffield and Jones, 2013; Le, 2011 among others). 3 The education-related impacts of remittances at the household-level are available from surveys of a limited number of Economic Modelling xxx (2015) xxx–xxx ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: jamal.bouoiyour@univ-pau.fr (J. Bouoiyour), miftah_amal@yahoo.fr (A. Miftah), em.mouhoud@dauphine.fr (E.M. Mouhoud). 1 Edmonds (2006) has found that receiving large cash transfers in the form of pensions has led to a large increase in child schooling in South Africa. Furthermore, rural children age 13–17 living with a person who is pension eligible are 8 percentage points or nearly 10% more likely to attend school than a child who is nearly eligible. 2 We can mention here the example of cash transfers programs which provide grants directly to poor households in Mexico and Brazil (see López-Calva and Lustig, 2010). The one example that's really interesting is the Mexico's Progresa program which consists of transferring public resources directly to poor families, allowing them to invest in their children's human capital. 3 In general, foreign inflows can help developing countries to overcome the classical growth challenge by providing additional funds for investment in physical and human capital and improving the productivity of physical capital. In this regard, existing literature encourages promoting the foreign inflows namely foreign direct investment and remit- tances by improving investment conditions in their recipient countries (see for example, Driffield and Jones, 2013). ECMODE-03849; No of Pages 8 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econmod.2015.10.026 0264-9993/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Economic Modelling journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecmod Please cite this article as: Bouoiyour, J., et al., Education, male gender preference and migrants' remittances: Interactions in rural Morocco, Econ. Model. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econmod.2015.10.026