Top Talent, Elite Colleges, and Migration: Evidence from the Indian Institutes of Technology

Prithwiraj Choudhury, Ina Ganguli and Patrick Gaulé

Journal of Development Economics, 2023, vol. 164, issue C

Abstract: We study migration in the right tail of the talent distribution using a novel dataset of Indian high school students taking the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), a college entrance exam used for admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). We find a high incidence of migration after students complete college: among the top 1000 scorers on the exam, 36% have migrated abroad, rising to 62% for the top 100 scorers. We next document that students who attended the original “Top 5” IIT were 5 percentage points more likely to migrate for graduate school compared to equally talented students who studied in other institutions. We explore two mechanisms for these patterns: signaling, for which we study migration after one university suddenly gained the IIT designation; and alumni networks, using information on the location of IIT alumni in U.S. computer science departments.

Keywords: Immigration; Science; Talent; Universities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J61 O33 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:164:y:2023:i:c:s0304387823000755

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2023.103120

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