Female labour migration is an important facet of the global labour market. Yet many countries have introduced policies to restrict their migration. In Sri Lanka, the Family Background Report (FBR) was introduced in 2013 to restrict mothers of children less than five years of age from seeking employment in domestic jobs abroad. This study aims to investigate how the introduction of the FBR affected different skills groups in their departures for foreign employment. The study uses monthly departure data from 2012 to 2018 in a difference-in-differences model, which exploits the variation in departure statistics before and after the introduction of the policy across two groups that were and were not affected.
