Gender gaps in developing economies depend on local labor markets, which are
largely agricultural, and tend to favor men. In recent years, international migration
has opened up new labor markets, which bring sought-after jobs to such communities.
While men dominate the ranks of international migrants, both the prospect of such
migration and departure of successful males could have spillover effects on women.
In this paper, we use an exogenous change in a selective education-based policy for
recruiting Nepali men to work in the British Army to examine the effect of these job
prospects for men on the human capital of women within the same household. We
find that men who were directly exposed to this change raised their education by 1.15
years. But these gains in male education came at the expense of resources previously
allocated to their female siblings. The education of female siblings declined by 0.11
years, increased their propensity to work on their household farms, and reduced their
weight-for-age z-score by 0.250 standard deviations. These negative intra-household
gender spillovers on education and health are not small, amounting to a 7% and 20%
decline over the average, respectively