Long-term relatedness between countries and international migrant selection

Tim Krieger, Laura Renner and Jens Ruhose ()

Journal of International Economics, 2018, vol. 113, issue C, 35-54

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)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022199618300436
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Long-Term Relatedness between Countries and International Migrant Selection (2018)
Working Paper: Long-Term Relatedness between Countries and International Migrant Selection (2018)
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:eee:inecon:v:113:y:2018:i:c:p:35-54

DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2018.04.002

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Economics is currently edited by Gourinchas, Pierre-Olivier and Rodríguez-Clare, Andrés

More articles in Journal of International Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().