This paper reviews four decades of economics research on the brain drain, with a focus on recent contributions and on development issues. We first assess the magnitude, intensity and determinants of the brain drain, showing that brain drain (or high-skill) migration is becoming the dominant...

Recent theoretical studies suggest that migration prospects can raise the expected return to human capital and thus foster education investment at home or, in other words, induce a brain gain. In a recent paper (Beine, Docquier and Rapoport, Economic Journal, 2008) we used the Docquier and...

Migration is an important and yet neglected determinant of institutions. The paper documents the channels through which emigration affects home country institutions and considers dynamic-panel regressions for a large sample of developing countries. We find that emigration and human capital both...

Two of the most salient trends surrounding the issue of migration and development over the last two decades are the large rise in remittances, and an increased flow of skilled migration. However, recent literature based on cross-country regressions has claimed that more educated migrants remit...

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 chapter focuses on the effects of skilled migration on developing countries. We first present new evidence on the magnitude of the brain drain at the international level. Using a stylized model of education investment in a context of migration, we then survey the theoretical and empirical...

Although many U.S. state policies presume that human capital is important for state economic development, there is little research linking better education to state incomes. In a complement to international studies of income differences, we investigate the extent to which quality-adjusted...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

Policy debates about the balance of vocational and general education programs focus on the school-to-work transition. But with rapid technological change, gains in youth employment from vocational education may be offset by less adaptability and thus diminished employment later in life. To test...

We investigate the relationship between remittances and migrants' education both theoretically and empirically, using original bilateral remittance data. At a theoretical level we lay out a model of remittances interacting migrants' human capital with two dimensions of immigration policy:...