Labor supply and migration in developing countries: econometric applications to Ivorian household data.

Summary Much of the empirical work on labor markets in developing countries focuses on macroeconomic changes in these markets. However, these macroeconomic changes do not always correctly reflect microeconomic changes at the agent level. This thesis proposes to analyze these microeconomic changes through the analysis of three major behaviors of African workers. It focuses on the migration and labor supply behaviors of individuals. The first behavior studied relates to the migration of rural labor to cities. Our results show that the wage gap between urban and rural areas does not encourage male workers to migrate. However, the urban wage remains an incentive for rural female labor migration. Nevertheless, the analysis of migration in terms of a binary choice can be overcome when the number of migrations made by each individual is available. The number of migrations made by a worker is supposed to account for the worker's turnover in the labor market. Our results indicate that higher wage offers in some regions have induced male and female workers to migrate in large numbers, and thus to change jobs or employers several times. While these analyses of migration behavior partly reflect changes in the labor markets of African countries, analysis of the allocation of available time between paid work and leisure is no less important. It appears that the greater presence of women in the Ivorian labor market has translated into an improvement in the consumption of goods (welfare) or in the bargaining power of women within households. In addition, it is clearly shown that members of the same household do not pool their income.