Remittances and the Brain Drain: Skilled Migrants Do Remit Less

Yoko Niimi, Caglar Ozden and Maurice Schiff

No 3393, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: It has been argued that the brain drain’s negative impact may be offset by the higher remittance levels skilled migrants send home. This paper examines whether remittances actually increase with migrants’ education level. The determinants of remittances it considers include migration levels or rates, migrants’ education level, and source countries’ income, financial sector development and expected growth rate. The estimation takes potential endogeneity into account, an issue not considered in the few studies on this topic. Our main finding is that remittances decrease with the share of migrants with tertiary education. This provides an additional reason for which source countries would prefer unskilled to skilled labor migration. Moreover, as predicted by our model, remittances increase with source countries’ level and rate of migration, financial sector development and population, and decrease with these countries’ income and expected growth rate.

Keywords: migration; remittances; education level; brain drain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 F24 J61 O15 O16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2008-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-mig
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (55)

Published - published in: Annales d’Economie et de Statistique, 2010, 97/98, 123-42

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3393.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Remittances and the Brain Drain: Skilled Migrants Do Remit Less (2010)
Working Paper: Remittances and the Brain Drain: Skilled Migrants Do Remit Less! (2008)
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:iza:izadps:dp3393

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().