Skilled emigration and skill creation: A quasi-experiment

Satish Chand and Michael Clemens

International and Development Economics Working Papers from International and Development Economics

Abstract: Does the emigration of highly-skilled workers deplete local human capital? The answer is not obvious if migration prospects induce human capital formation. We analyze a unique natural quasi-experiment in the Republic of the Fiji Islands, where political shocks have provoked one of the largest recorded exoduses of skilled workers from a developing country. Mass emigration began unexpectedly and has occurred only in a well-defined subset of the population, creating a treatment group that foresaw likely emigration and two different quasi-control groups that did not. We use rich census and administrative microdata to address a range of concerns about experimental validity. This allows plausible causal attribution of post-shock changes in human capital accumulation to changes in emigration patterns. We show that high rates of emigration by tertiary-educated Fiji Islanders not only raised investment in tertiary education in Fiji; they moreover raised the stock of tertiary educated people in Fiji—net of departures.

Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-mig
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (54)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idc:wpaper:idec08-05

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