Abstract

We test whether social networks at the origin, measured by religious affiliation, affect out-migration. The basic idea is that a social capital loss is attached to the decision to out-migrate, and said loss increases migration costs because benefits received from the local network at the origin disappear. To test this hypothesis, we estimated conditional and mixed logit models for the decision to out-migrate. The results supported the hypothesis: members from religious organizations with strong intra-community and weak intercommunity ties tended to out-migrate less than others. This result was highly significant and robust to model specification and estimation methods.