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

Prithwiraj Choudhury, Ina Ganguli and Patrick Gaulé

No 31308, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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 1,000 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” Indian Institutes of Technology (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.

JEL-codes: F22 J61 O33 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-06
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Published as Prithwiraj Choudhury & Ina Ganguli & Patrick Gaulé, 2023. "Top talent, elite colleges, and migration: Evidence from the Indian Institutes of technology," Journal of Development Economics, .

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