 The main reason why we started this paper is because at that time there was a huge surge of interest in this gendered approach of migration and there are more and more papers on how migration brings about changes in the fabric of a society in the origin countries. And then there's also this strand of literature that looks at women left behind and the role in what has been called the migration development nexus. So we try to look a bit at what happens especially when the female relatives of migrants are within a household and we try to see what are the impacts on these female relatives. Not only the wife because most of the literature is focused on the wife. So we try to look a bit broader than this because most of the papers and this was also our hypothesis is that the male migration can bring about a sort of empowerment for women. It has been seen a bit in the case of Egypt and of Jordan and we wanted to also to test it in the case of Morocco. There's then this growing external literature on the impact of migration and also on the impact of migration separate from that of remittances on the family members left behind. So this is our main question of research is how does immigration and remittances separately will impact female activity rates in Morocco and then whether there are any implications in terms of empowerment. We therefore will test the validity of the hypothesis in the case of Morocco because there is very little research on Morocco mainly due to a lack of data. The research that there is it's mostly qualitative and I'll come to that in a short while and then another question that came out is actually what drives women labor market participation in Morocco. So we also try to look a bit in what are the factors that push women to go on the labor market in Morocco and then in order to better understand the mechanisms we use with this quantitative and qualitative approach. Now for a little bit of literature and most of the literature is around the various channels of the first channel through which we expect migration to have an impact on women labor market participation is through a labor substitution effect of migration with men or individual living one region therefore it creates a decrease in the supply of labor force and we might expect that labor participation of individuals left behind would increase in order to compensate for those that have left the region. Then you also have studies on the impact of remittances mainly on reservation wage that show that once when a household receives remittances their reservation wage might go up in a sense that they can prefer not to go on the labor market since they already have a source of income although it has been shown that this can also increase for instance the time spent in education it's not just the substitution is not just about leisure but then in the case mostly of rural areas it has been shown that remittances can lift the budget constraints and therefore families that would receive remittances can use this extra money in order to hire agricultural workers for instance and then themselves they can withdraw from the labor market. Nevertheless we know that in the MENA region the labor division it's very gendered we rarely see especially in the rural areas women that can go on the labor market to take over the extra labor demand that the men have left behind if male emigrates it's rarely the case that the women will go to replace them on the labor market and then what we also have and especially in the case of Morocco are very resilient cultural norms and these cultural norms they act towards lowering women labor women's labor market participation because the traditional social values in the Middle East and North African region are for women to stay at home not go out that much and while going on the labor market has an implication on women actually going out of the house so we don't know exactly what would be the effect of migration on labor market participation. A few things on the Moroccan context so as you might know international migration from Morocco it's very important mainly directed towards Europe and most of it comes from the rural areas so we have tried to look a bit at the impact of migration on poverty rates or I'll just come to that. Heinrich Haas has shown that between 20 and 50 percent of households in the rift mountains have at least one migrant so it's a phenomenon that touches upon a very large share of the society in Morocco and it has been shown that remittances have a strong impact on the living standards of households and Soudi and Toto had had computed that without remittances the poverty would go up by more than than four percentage points. Then about women in the labor market in Morocco so Morocco a bit like the other countries in the MENA region has a very low female economic activity. It had gone up from 1971 until 2007 from 12 percent to a bit more than 27 percent but still very low female labor market participation especially given the high increase that Morocco experienced in terms of education of women. This increase in the level of education of women was also accompanied by the decrease in the age of marriage so we might have expected that the labor market would increase and we didn't see that increase. Also in terms of what women do when they are actively employed we saw that they are mainly unpaid family workers so this is mainly in rural areas. In rural areas their activity rate it's a bit lower but still there are mainly out in the fields they do animal husbandry they they work the crops but these are very low skilled and very bad well the conditions are very bad for women in general when they do work. Then there was also a study by who shows that the social cultural factors are very important in explaining these very low levels of participation. Now what do we do in the study so it's easier so we use an explanatory mixed methods approach following Croissant and Planau-Clarpe and we use in-depth interviews and also quantitative data so the quantitative data it's the 2006 and 2007 Morocco living standard measurements. As I mentioned the data it's something very delicate to get in Morocco the planning the high planning commission is the one that runs all the surveys but the access to the data is very limited so we managed to get this data set from one of the directors but it was an exception so we're very happy that we could get it in order to test a bit at the national level what are the impacts. In this survey there are around seven thousand households and 36,000 individuals and among them we have approximately 12,000 women which are between 15 and 60 years old so we can look at the activity rates and then the qualitative data consists of 12 in-depth interviews with women which are living in households with international migrants. They have been run in the rural area in the Togba Valley in southern Morocco so just a few very quick numbers in order to give you a bit of an idea of the Moroccan households so we have divided them in three types households which do not have international migrants nor do they receive remittances households which have international migrants but no remittances and households which have international migrants and receive remittances. You can see that 11 percent of the sample of the survey are made of households which have both international migrants and remittances and also that these households are they have a higher expenditure compared to that of households without migrants and remittances however we have also a difference with the households which have migrants but don't receive remittances. These last households they are also slightly different in terms of the number of household members which are which are employed they have a slightly higher number of members which are employed and what's more interesting also to look at is the percentage of the household that have a production unit because we would have expected to see a difference and what we actually see is that the percentage is slightly lower for the households with migrants but no remittances but finally there is not a big difference. If we look at women in these three types of households because of these are on the on the women between 15 and 60 years old and on the first column you have the means for the women in the type one household and in the other two columns you have the differences compared to this first column and it indicates whether it's significant or not and you see that women's profiles are very different in the households which are exposed to international migration. They are less likely to be in rural areas they are more educated and also in terms of household composition you can see that for women living in households with migrants but without remittances have a higher probability of living with their parents in law and of course this might have an impact afterwards on their labor market participation. In terms of labor market outcomes we can see here that the labor market participation is also very different and that it's significantly lower for women which live in households exposed to international migration with or without remittances. So the model that we estimated it's also due to the quality of data that we constructed the model as you will see it so it's a very first model of the determinants of the labor market participation in which we distinguish between the probability of having a migrant and the remittances that the household receives. And then we will estimate different models because we observe some effects on the labor market participation but with the in-depth interviews we realize that the picture is way more complicated than just looking at labor market participation. So then we'll also be estimating the probability of being an unpaid family worker and also the probability of having an income generating activity. Since both migration remittances are endogenous we will have an instrumental approach. We instrument migration using the historical regional intensity of migration that was provided to us by the Geographic and Historical Institute of Morocco and for remittances we finally end up using the remittance norm at the village level. We had initially constructed the database with all the remittance points so all the money grant and Western Union and post points all over Morocco. It didn't work as an instrument but if anyone's interested we do have it and so we end up using the discriminance norm. Now you can't see here very well it's going to make it a bit better. What you see here is the estimation of the second column is the model with the instruments and what we find is that having an international migrant increase, thank you Nick, increases the probability of women going on the labor market. So it increases women's labor market participation however receiving remittances decreases women's labor market participation. So I will come up to the other results but what I wanted to show you first are the results by different labor market outcomes because for us this was somehow a puzzling result. So what we do see is that when we look at unpaid family workers we find this effect, this positive effect of migration so we find the labor compensation effect however with remittances we find again this negative effect. What I will again come back to that but what it actually means is that in rural areas women prefer to withdraw from the labor market when they receive remittances because well they are mostly out in the field in the sun and doing a very inconvenient work whereas neither having an international migrant nor remittances have an effect on income generating activities. Given that we know that the the probability of having an income generating activity is the main determinant of women empowerment we can therefore see that well expect that migration will not have an impact on on women's empowerment in Morocco through the labor market. Now another interesting graphic I wanted to show you is that of the marital stages because up here we can also see that being married lowers women's labor market participation. This you have it here also living with the with the parents in law women's labor market participation so what we did is simply plotted the activity rate compared to age have there and then the red line is actually the mean age at the time of marriage and what we do see is that the activity rate increases until the average age of the time of marriage and then decreases afterwards. Then we also ran some robustness checks first of all because we do have have some potentially indulgence controls and the other issue that we stumbled upon is the case of the household which had migrants but didn't receive remittances because as you remember their profiles it's slightly different from the others. So for the first problem for the potentially indulgence controls we ran the correlations between the variables of interest and the variables we considered to be potentially indulgence mainly the consumption expenditure whether the household has an internal migrant the number of children under the age of six and whether the household has a livestock and the coefficients that we got are rather low so we think that that's not going to be a problem and then we also ran the regression with and without the exogenous controls and our results are rather consistent are consistent with the initial ones and then for the second one we had thought that what could these households be so the first idea that we got is that maybe these households which have international migration but do not receive remittances are households which have international students abroad because it's these are the ones that seemed more likely to be in this case so we withdraw from the sample the households which had students but with the migrants had been abroad for studies and again we have the same results as before and a few of our key study findings which we couldn't see exactly in the data and here's also where we've seen how complementary the two databases were first of all the channels that play that we couldn't grasp with the data are those of social pressure first of all because men are expected to send remittances in order to have their to in order for their women for their wives to be able to stay at home and this is something we have often seen in the interviews in general when a woman has to go to work this is interpreted as the lack of of the husband's ability to provide for her so he needs to go on the labor market and also we we've also had women that's that told us that whenever they they received remittances that allowed them to hire women from households which only had internal migrants in order to help them out with the workload and I'm going to finish really fast with with these two because this they didn't appear in the in the in the quantitative data first of all the importance of who is the remittance receiver and this is something we see throughout the literature and it's also something that you show me in your in your project because in general women said that when they ask the remittance receiver for money in this case it's a broader law but it can also be parents in law they would say no so they would be deprived of direct access to the remittances which could also be expected to have an empowering role and then again we found this this idea of the importance of the income generating activities for women's status because several women had said that they would like to work just to have their own money and therefore feel more empowered be able to do whatever they want with with their money really fast on the concluding remarks so we find a labor supply compensation effect of migration however when we look at unpaid family family worker this effect is stronger because we think that this is a labor supply driven effect which is the one which is impacted by migration whereas the income generating activity which is a labor demand driven mechanism is not impacted by migration and therefore we think that international migration is unlikely to play a role in women's empowerment in Morocco because the labor market conditions are so bad that women prefer not to go on the on the labor market and they're finished thank you