Education Policies and Migration across European Countries

Ainoa Aparicio and Zoe Kuehn ()

No 9755, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper tests whether and how two education policies: (i) increasing the length of compulsory education and (ii) introducing foreign languages into compulsory school curricula, affect subsequent migration across European countries. We construct a novel data base that includes information on education reforms for thirty-one countries spanning four decades. Combining this data with information on recent migration flows by cohorts, we find that an additional year of compulsory education reduces the number of emigrants by almost 10%. Increasing the length of compulsory education shifts educational attainment for a significant fraction of the population from low towards medium levels. Our findings are thus in line with the fact that in the majority of European countries medium educated individuals display lower emigration rates than low educated individuals. Introducing a foreign language into compulsory school curricula on the other hand, almost doubles the number of emigrants to the country where the language is spoken and increases the total number of emigrants by 20%. Depending on the specific content of an education policy, "more education" can thus have opposite effects on migration.

Keywords: migration; compulsory schooling; foreign language proficiency; education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 I20 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2016-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eur and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Demography, 2017, 54 (6), 2181-2200

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9755.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Education Policies and Migration across European Countries (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9755

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().