•We study the determinants of location choice of foreign students.•We analyze that issue in a multi-origin multi-destination framework.•We find evidence of a network effect for the migration of ...students.•We find that quality of education and costs of living at destination play a role.•The role of education fees is more ambiguous.
This paper analyzes the determinants of the choice of location of international students. Building on the documented trends in international migration of students, we identify the various factors associated to the attraction of migrants as well as the costs of moving abroad. Using new data capturing the number of students from a large set of origin countries studying in a set of 13 OECD countries, we assess the importance of the various factors identified in the theory. We find support for a significant network effect in the migration of students, a result so far undocumented in the literature. We also find a significant role for cost factors such as housing prices and for attractiveness variables such as the reported quality of universities. In contrast, we do not find an important role for registration fees.
The use of bilateral data for the analysis of international migration is at the same time a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because the dyadic dimension of the data allows researchers to ...address a number of previously unanswered questions, but it is also a curse for the various analytical challenges it gives rise to. This paper presents the theoretical foundations of the estimation of gravity models of international migration, and the main difficulties that have to be tackled in the econometric analysis, such as the nature of migration data, how to account for multilateral resistance to migration or endogeneity. We also review some empirical evidence that has considered these issues.
Using new data on emigration rates by education level, we examine the impact of brain drain migration on human capital formation in developing countries. We find evidence of a positive effect of ...skilled migration prospects on gross human capital formation in a cross-section of 127 countries. For each country of the sample we then estimate the net effect of the brain drain using counterfactual simulations. Countries combining relatively low levels of human capital and low emigration rates are shown to experience a 'beneficial brain drain', and conversely, there are more losers than winners, and the former tend to lose relatively more than what the latter gain.
We measure stock market coexceedances using the methodology of Cappiello, Gerard and Manganelli (2005, ECB Working Paper 501). This method enables us to measure comovement at each point of the return ...distribution. First, we construct annual coexceedance probabilities for both lower and upper tail return quantiles using daily data from 1974–2006. Next, we explain these probabilities in a panel gravity model framework. Results show that macroeconomic variables asymmetrically impact stock market comovement across the return distribution. Financial liberalization significantly increases left tail comovement, whereas trade integration significantly increases comovement across all quantiles. Decreasing exchange rate volatility results in increasing lower tail comovement. The introduction of the euro increases comovement across the entire return distribution, thereby significantly reducing the benefits of portfolio diversification within the euro area.
This paper introduces a method and preliminary findings from a database that systematically measures the character and stringency of immigration policies. Based on the selection of that data for nine ...countries between 1999 and 2008, we challenge the idea that any one country is systematically the most or least restrictive toward admissions. The data also reveal trends toward more complex and, often, more restrictive regulation since the 1990s, as well as differential treatment of groups, such as lower requirements for highly skilled than low-skilled labor migrants. These patterns illustrate the IMPALA data and methods but are also of intrinsic importance to understanding immigration regulation.
This paper examines the relationship between international migration and source country fertility. The impact of international migration on source country fertility may have a number of causes, ...including a transfer of destination countries' fertility norms. We provide a rigorous test of the diffusion of fertility norms using highly detailed original data on migration. Our results provide evidence of a significant transfer of destination countries' fertility norms from migrants to their country of origin: a 1% decrease (increase) in the fertility norm to which migrants are exposed reduces (raises) home country fertility by about 0.3%. Cet étudie la relation entre la migration internationale et la fécondité dans les pays d'origine des migrants. L'impact de la migration internationale sur la fécondité peut avoir plusieurs causes, y compris un transfert des normes de fécondité dans les pays de destination. On fournit un test rigoureux de la diffusion des normes de fécondité à l'aide de données originales détaillées sur la migration. Les résultats révèlent un transfert significatif des normes de fécondité des pays de destination vers les pays d'origine par le biais de la migration : un déclin de 1% dans la norme de fécondité à laquelle les migrants sont exposés réduit la fécondité dans le pays d'origine d'environ 0.3%.
We focus on the impact of migration prospects on human capital formation and growth in a small, open developing economy. We assume that agents are heterogeneous in skills and take their educational ...decisions in a context of uncertainty regarding future migrations. We distinguish two growth effects: an ex ante “brain effect” (migration prospects foster investments in education because of higher returns abroad), and an ex post “drain effect” (because of actual migration flows). The case for a beneficial brain drain (BBD) emerges when the first effect dominates, i.e., when the average level of human capital is higher in the economy opened to migrations than in the closed economy. We derive the theoretical conditions required for such a possibility to be observed. Using cross-section data for 37 developing countries, we find that the possibility of a BBD could be more than a theoretical curiosity.
► We measure the strength of the Canadian dollar through currency components. ► The CAD component is driven by commodity prices, giving evidence for a Dutch disease. ► Employment drops reacting to ...this component, in industries exposed to international trade. ► This illustrates a negative side-effect of the oil-resource richness in Alberta.
We argue that the failure to disentangle the evolution of the Canadian currency from the U.S. currency leads to potentially incorrect conclusions regarding the case of Dutch disease in Canada. We propose a new approach that is aimed at extracting both currency components and energy- and commodity-price components from observed exchange rates and prices. We first analyze the separate influence of commodity prices on the Canadian and the U.S. currency components. We then estimate the separate impact of the two currency components on the shares of manufacturing employment in Canada. We show that between 33 and 39 per cent of the manufacturing employment loss that was due to exchange rate developments between 2002 and 2007 is related to the Dutch disease phenomenon. The remaining proportion of the employment loss can be ascribed to the weakness of the U.S.
We examine natural disasters and long-run climatic factors as potential determinants of international migration, implementing a panel dataset of bilateral migration flows from 1960 to 2000. We find ...no direct effect of long-run climatic factors on international migration across our entire sample. These results are robust when conditioning on origin-country characteristics, when considering migrants returning home, and when accounting for the potential endogeneity of migrant networks. Rather, we find evidence of indirect effects of environmental factors operating through wages. We find that epidemics and miscellaneous incidents spur international migration, and there is strong evidence that natural disasters beget greater flows of migrants to urban environs.
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