The recent literature about the so called brain drain assumes that destination countries are characterized not only by higher wages than the source country, but also by a higher or at least not lower relative return to skill. As this assumption has a doubtful empirical validity, we assess...

In this paper, we analyze how skilled migration contributes to TFP growth in the sending countries when diaspora effects in technology diffusion are introduced. To investigate this issue, we start from a previous paper by Vandenbussche, Aghion and Meghir (2006), who examine the contribution of...

This paper uses census data from 1980 to 2006 to study the new European emigration to the US. This emigration is about a small but rising number of individuals. Yet since 1990, emigrants are increasingly selected from the upper tail quality distribution of their source country workforce in terms...

Discussions of high-skilled mobility typically evoke migration patterns from poorer to wealthier countries, which ignore movements to and between developing countries. This paper presents, for the first time, a global overview of human capital mobility through bilateral migration stocks by...

Why do people leave high-income countries with extensive welfare states? This article will examine what underlies the emigration intentions of native-born inhabitants of one industrialized country in particular: the Netherlands. To understand emigration from high-income countries we focus not...

This paper develops a signaling theory where brain drain as well as the opposite of brain drain, a phenomenon we call “lame-drain” can result. In particular, we assume there are three types of agents according to their intrinsic abilities; education (with endogenous intensity) consists of...

In the past, the exodus of skills from the southern to the northern hemisphere was Heraclitean, permanent and irreversible, so it was often likened to a hemorrhage of brains and a bias to development. For a long time reduced to its pejorative connotation, this "brain drain" begins over the last...

When skilled workers migrate, they face the brain waste risk, i.e., they can end up employed as unskilled. We analyze the effects of brain waste on brain drain, resulting from low international transferability of skills. We show that this type of brain waste: (1) reduces education incentives;...

The aim of this article is to identify whether Romania is facing the brain waste in the medical sector. Romania is producing the highest number of medical graduates compared to the main destination countries for Romanian physicians.However, it faces critical shortages in terms of health...