How does the amount of land youth expect to inherit affect their migration and employment decisions?
We explore this question in the context of rural Ethiopia using data on whether youth household members
from 2010 had migrated by 2014, and in which sector they work. We estimate a household fixed effects
model and exploit exogenous variation in the timing of land redistributions to overcome endogenous
household decisions about how much land to bequeath to descendants. We find that larger expected land
inheritances significantly lower the likelihood of long-distance permanent migration and of permanent
migration to urban areas. Inheriting more land also leads to a significantly higher likelihood of employment
in agriculture and a lower likelihood of employment in the non-agricultural sector. Conversely, the
decision to attend school is unaffected. These results appear to be most heavily driven by males and
by the older half of our youth sample. We also find suggestive evidence that several mediating factors
matter. Land inheritance is a much stronger predictor of rural-to-urban permanent migration and nonagricultural-sector
employment in areas with less vibrant land markets, in relatively remote areas (those
far from major urban centers), and in areas with lower soil quality. Overall, these results affirm the
importance of push factors in dictating occupation and migration decisions in Ethiopia.