Long-Term Relatedness between Countries and International Migrant Selection

Tim Krieger, Laura Renner (laura.renner@vwl.uni-freiburg.de) and Jens Ruhose (ruhose@economics.uni-kiel.de)
Additional contact information
Laura Renner: University of Freiburg

No 11488, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper studies the effect of the long-term relatedness between countries, measured by their genetic distance, on educational migrant selection. Analyzing bilateral migrant stocks of the 15 main destination countries and 85 sending countries for the year 2000, we find that migrant selection and genetic distance follow a nonlinear J-shaped pattern: at low levels of genetic distance, increases in genetic distance reduce the positive selection of migration. However, at higher levels of genetic distance, this pattern is reversed and migration becomes more positively selected. We complement this finding by showing that the net benefits of genetic distance are strongly decreasing for low-skilled migrants with increasing genetic distance, while high-skilled migrants are less responsive to genetic distance in general. Results are robust to conditioning on bilateral control variables, including various destination- and sending-country-specific fixed effects and applying an instrumental-variables approach that exploits exogenous variation in genetic distances in the year 1500.

Keywords: long-term relatedness; genetic distance; culture; international migration; selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J61 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 64 pages
Date: 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int, nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Forthcoming - published in: Journal of International Economics, 2018, 113, 35-54

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Related works:
Journal Article: Long-term relatedness between countries and international migrant selection (2018)
Working Paper: Long-Term Relatedness between Countries and International Migrant Selection (2018)
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