Top Talent, Elite Colleges, and Migration: Evidence from the Indian Institutes of Technology

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Choudhury, Prithwiraj; Ganguli, Ina; Gaule, Patrick
• 署名单位: Harvard University; University of Massachusetts System; University of Massachusetts Amherst; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Bristol
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3878
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2023.103120
• 发表日期: 2023
• 关键词: immigration; science; Talent; universities

摘要

We study migration in the right tail of the talent distribution using a novel dataset of Indian high school students taking the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), a college entrance exam used for admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). We find a high incidence of migration after students complete college: among the top 1000 scorers on the exam, 36% have migrated abroad, rising to 62% for the top 100 scorers. We next document that students who attended the original Top 5 IIT were 5 percentage points more likely to migrate for graduate school compared to equally talented students who studied in other institutions. We explore two mechanisms for these patterns: signaling, for which we study migration after one university suddenly gained the IIT designation; and alumni networks, using information on the location of IIT alumni in U.S. computer science departments.