Overseas work can raise a family’s income but also split the household geographically, with theoretically ambiguous net effects on decisions about work, investment, and education. We study a policy discontinuity in the Philippines that resulted in quasirandom assignment of temporary, partial-household migration to high-wage jobs in Korea. This allows quasi-experimental estimates of reduced-form effects on migrant households’ spending, saving, borrowing, business income, and investment in children. A purpose-built survey allows nonexperimental tests of different mechanisms for the effect. These suggest that an important channel — beyond remittance income — involves changes in household decision-making power when migration separates married couples. We find no evidence that migration affects labor force participation by non-migrant family members.