International mobility of academics: Theory and evidence

Gianni De Fraja

No 2025-03, Discussion Papers from University of Nottingham, GEP

Abstract: The labour force in the university sector of many countries is extremely international. I propose a theoretical model to study cross border academic mobility, where academics bargain with institutions over pay and choose the countries where they live and work to maximise their lifetime utility. I then test the model on a sample of well over 900,000 research active academics over 33 years. The model predicts how academics respond both to changes in external conditions, including exchange rate fluctuations, and to changes in their record, measured by their publications and their citations. The theoretical predictions are confirmed by the empirical analysis.

Keywords: Academic migration; university; international academic mobility; research; higher education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig, nep-opm and nep-sog
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/gep/documents/papers/2025/25-03.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:not:notgep:2025-03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from University of Nottingham, GEP School of Economics University of Nottingham University Park Nottingham NG7 2RD. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hilary Hughes ().