Ability drain's (AD) impact on host countries is significant: 30 percent of US Nobel laureates since 1906 are immigrants, and they or their children founded 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies. However, while brain drain (BD) and gain (BG) have been studied extensively, AD has not. I examine...

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...

We develop a theoretical model of human skill formation and emigration. Additionally to existing brain drain models, we partly endogenize the heterogeneity of the individuals, by introducing aspirations. Emigration of an individual will result in a migration experience, which increases the...

Emigrants from Italy and Ireland contributed disproportionately to the Age of Mass Migration. That their departure improved the living standards of those they left behind is hardly in doubt. Nevertheless, a voluminous literature on the selectivity of migrant flows - both from sending and...

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...

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...

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...