Brain drain or brain gain? International labor mobility and human capital formation

Anelí Bongers, Carmen Diaz-Roldan and Jose Torres ()

The Journal of International Trade & Economic Development, 2022, vol. 31, issue 5, 647-671

Abstract: This paper studies the impact of international labor migration on human capital investment in both hosting and sending countries using an integrated theoretical framework. We develop a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium human capital investment model with international labor mobility, in which both decisions to migrate and to invest in skill acquisition are endogenous. We show that the human capital formation process in the countries of origin is very sensitive to migration policies implemented by hosting countries. Our findings show that human capital accumulation in the sending country is encouraged by the possibility of emigration to higher labor productivity countries, supporting the recent view of the ‘brain gain’ hypothesis. Productivity shocks hitting the hosting country reduce the human capital investment by natives but increase the human capital investment in the sending country when migration is allowed. Finally, we find that migration increases world human capital, increasing the stock of human capital in both hosting and sending countries.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09638199.2021.2004209 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Brain Drain or Brain Gain? International labor mobility and human capital formation (2018)
Working Paper: Brain Drain or Brain Gain? International labor mobility and human capital formation (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:taf:jitecd:v:31:y:2022:i:5:p:647-671

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJTE20

DOI: 10.1080/09638199.2021.2004209

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of International Trade & Economic Development is currently edited by Pasquale Sgro, David E.A. Giles and Charles van Marrewijk

More articles in The Journal of International Trade & Economic Development from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().