Despite their small number, Israeli economists have become an important fixture in the international academic scene. In recent years, this phenomenon has been characterized by an additional attribute: the number of Israelis who have chosen to leave the country’s universities - or not to return...

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;...

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...

This work focuses on a temporary guest-worker-type migration of individuals from the middle class of the wealth distribution. The article demonstrates that the possibility of a low-skilled guest-worker employment in a higher wage foreign country lowers the relative attractiveness of the skilled...

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...

Migrant scientists outperform domestic scientists. The result persists after instrumenting migration for reasons of work or study with migration in childhood to minimize the effect of selection. The results are consistent with theories of knowledge recombination and specialty matching.