A Gendered Assessment of the Brain Drain

Abstract

This paper updates and extends the Docquier-Marfouk data set on international migration by educational attainment. We use new sources, homogenize de…nitions of what a migrant is, and compute gender-disaggregated indicators of the brain drain. Emigration stocks and rates are provided by level of schooling and gender for 195 source countries in 1990 and 2000. Our data set can be used to capture the recent trend in women's brain drain and to analyze its causes and consequences for developing countries. We show that women represent an increasing share of the OECD immigration stock and exhibit relatively higher rates of brain drain than men. The gender gap in skilled migration is strongly correlated with the gender gap in educational attainment at origin. Equating women's and men's access to education would probably reduce gender di¤erences in the brain drain. JEL Classi…cation: F22, J61.

Wage Effects of High-Skilled Migration: International Evidence

“…9 In the working paper version of this article (Grossmann and Stadelmann, 2008), we presented evidence for the interaction between emigration ‡ows and income changes using a structural equation model. However, we looked at the impact of a higher aggregate emigration stock of a country on its per capita income.…”

“…Docquier and Marfouk (2006) As we are interested in the bilateral migration pattern of high-skilled individuals, we focus on emigration of the high educational category provided in an extended dataset by Docquier, Marfouk and Lowell (2007). We construct the high-skilled emigration rate from country i to j in year t, denoted by M ig ij;t , as the stock of skilled emigrants from country i living in (OECD) country j divided by the stock of skilled residents in (source) country i in year t.…”

“…We argue that international migration of high-skilled workers triggers productivity e¤ects at the macro level such that the wage rate of skilled workers may well rise in host countries and decline in source countries. By exploiting a recent data set on international bilateral migration ‡ows (Docquier, Marfouk and Lowell, 2007), we empirically examine the impact of an increase in high-skilled emigration rates on di¤erences in both (log) wage income of skilled workers and per capita income between pairs of source and destination countries. We propose a wide range of instrumental variables to address the potential reverse causality problem 1 The number of tertiary educated immigrants living in OECD countries has increased from 12.5 million in the year 1990 to 20.4 million in 2000 (Docquier and Marfouk, 2006).…”

Remittances, migrants' education and immigration policy: Theory and evidence from bilateral data

“…The methodology used in Docquier et al (2010) consists of three steps. The starting point is the database described in Docquier, Lowell and Marfouk (2009) documenting bilateral migration stock to OECD host countries. It is based on a collection of census and register immigration data by country of birth and educational level in the 30 OECD countries.…”

Migration and trade union rights

“…we decide to run two-steps Heckman estimates without additional instrument 9 . Data on migration are from Docquier, Marfouk and Lowell (2007) and are available for 1991 and 2001 10 . Due to the small number of period, we do not include time or country fixed effects 11 .…”