For nearly four decades now, the conventional wisdom has been that the migration of human capital (skilled workers) from a developing country to a developed country is detrimental to the developing country. However, this perception need not hold. A well designed migration policy can result in a...

This paper presents a new bilateral database documenting international migration stocks by gender, education level, origin and destination. We build on existing databases of OECD host countries in 1990 and 2000 and expand their coverage by collecting or estimating migration to all non-OECD...

The remarkable influx of Chinese migrant entrepreneurs in different West African countries in recent years has been met with growing resistance by established local entrepreneurs. Whether the former have a competitive edge over the latter because of distinctive socio-cultural traits, or whether...

The recent brain drain literature showed that the skilled emigration can improve the average level of schooling in developing countries. Indeed, the brain drain issue seems to be at the heart of policy priorities for the source countries. It’s in this context that our interest in this paper...

Quite often, migrants appear to exert little effort to absorb the mainstream culture and to learn the language of their host society, even though the economic returns (increased productivity and enhanced earnings) to assimilation are high. We show that when interpersonal comparisons affect...

While Mexico's southern states differ substantially in terms of their migration profile, many of the issues confronted by the three states are the same. In this paper, we focus on five questions: (a) How large are migration flows, and what can be expected in the future?; (b) To what extent does...

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...

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...

Our paper studies the causes of poverty from the perspective of job search. We show that poor people remain poor because they have less time and initial endowment to search for a better job. Initial endowment is key to successful job search, as one can afford not to work and search longer for a...