A growing number of OECD countries are leaning toward adopting quality-selective immigration policies. The underlying assumption behind such policies is that more skill-selection should raise immigrants' average quality (or education level). This view tends to neglect two important dynamic...

This paper critiques the last decade of research on the effects of high-skill emigration from developing countries, and proposes six new directions for fruitful research. The study singles out a core assumption underlying much of the recent literature, calling it the Lump of Learning model of...

The proportion of foreign-born people in rich countries has tripled since 1960, and the emigration of high-skilled people from poor countries has accelerated. Many countries intensify their efforts to attract and retain foreign students, which increases the risk of brain drain in the sending...

Is ability drain (AD) economically significant? That immigrants or their children founded over 40% of the Fortune 500 US companies suggests it is. Moreover, brain drain (BD) induces a brain gain (BG). This cannot occur with ability. Nonetheless, while BD has been studied extensively, AD drain...

Research on the relationship between high-skilled migration and remittances has been limited by the lack of suitable microdata. We create a unique cross-country dataset by combining household surveys from five Sub-Saharan African countries that enables us to analyze the effect of migrants'...

High-skilled workers are four times more likely to migrate than low-skilled workers. This skill bias in migration - often called brain drain - has been at the center of a heated debate about the welfare consequences of emigration from developing countries. In this paper, we provide a global...

Despite the bulk of international migrants being youth, little is known about the factors driving young people's migration behavior at the global level. Using the individual-level survey data from Gallup World Poll across 139 countries over the period 2010-2016, this study contributes to the...

We consider how the possibility of international migration affects an individual’s educational choices in their home country. Without the opportunity to emigrate abroad people choose their educational investment (and hence their skill level) as we might expect, taking into account the utility...

Theory suggests that groups historically subject to discrimination, such as Jews, could exhibit traditionally high investment in education because discrimination spurred exit facilitated by human capital. Theory moreover suggests that if exit is uncertain, it could induce investment in skill...

We examine a little-known restriction on high-skill immigration to the United States, the Exchange Visitor Skills List. This List mandates that to become eligible for long-term status in the U.S., certain high-skill visitors must reside in their home countries for two years after participation...