Credit Availability and Internal Migration: Evidence from Thailand

This study investigates the relationship between borrowing and internal migration. Exploiting the micro-finance scheme Village Fund in Thailand, it investigates the short- and medium-term effects of borrowing since the policy’s introduction. Employing an instrumental variables approach, borrowing is instrumented using the inverse number of households per village at the beginning of the policy to capture potential credit availability. The findings suggest that internal migration in Thailand is not credit constrained and its interaction with credit is time-related. Borrowing reduces internal migration in the medium-term, but is found not to affect migration when the policy is first introduced.