The Effects of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills on Migration Decisions.

Abstract

There is growing evidence that cognitive and noncognitive skills affect the economic and social outcomes of individuals. In this paper, we analyze how they affect the migration decisions of individuals during their lifetimes. We use data that combine military enlistment and administrative records for the male population born in 1932 and 1933 in Norway. Records of interviews with a psychologist at age 18 allow us to construct an index of 'sociability' and 'adaptability' for each individual, as well as an index of cognitive ability, the intelligence quotient. We find that adaptability and cognitive ability have significant and positive impacts on the probability of an individual migrating out of his area, whether this involves rural-urban, long distance, or international migration. Adaptability has a particularly strong impact on migration for individuals with low cognitive skills, implying a strong positive selection of less educated migrants with respect to the (previously unobserved) adaptability skill. We also show that cognitive skills have a strong positive effect on the pre-and post-migration wage differential, whereas adaptability has no significant effect. Moreover, individuals with high cognitive ability migrate to areas with large wage returns to cognitive abilities, whereas this is not true for individuals with high adaptability. This evidence suggests that adaptability reduces the psychological cost of migrating, whereas cognitive skills increase the monetary returns associated with migration.JEL Codes: J61, J24, R23.

Childhood nutrition and labor market outcomes: Evidence from a school breakfast program

“…Considering Norwegians born from 1930 to 1945 with younger siblings, Bütikofer and Salvanes (2015) find that more than 90 percent had younger siblings born in the same municipality. 11 In addition,Bütikofer and Peri (2015) find that only 15% of the male cohorts born in 1932 and 1933 are living in a different municipality in the year of military enlistment…”

The Impact of Non-Cognitive Skills and Risk Preferences on Rural-to-Urban Migration: Evidence from Ukraine

“…Yet only little is known about the role of non-cognitive skills for individual migration decisions (Bütikofer and Peri, 2016). The current study contributes to this scarce literature by providing evidence on the impact of non-cognitive skills on the decision to migrate within a country.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, there is only one economic paper on the impact of non-cognitive skills on the decision to migrate. Bütikofer and Peri (2016) investigate the importance of cognitive and non-cognitive skills on the probability of migrating out of one's region of origin for the male population in Norway. Focusing on two aspects of non-cognitive skills, namely`adaptability' and`sociability', they nd that adaptability has a particularly strong impact on migration for individuals with low cognitive skills.…”

The skill development of children of immigrants

“…Our results are consistent with the idea that noncognitive skill production is higher in low-skill immigrant families than in low-skill native families. Indeed, Bütikofer and Peri (2017) find that migrants, and particularly low-skill migrants, are positively selected on adaptability, though not sociability.…”