What affects international migration of European science and engineering graduates?

Abstract

Using a data set of science and engineering graduates from 12 European countries, we analyse the determinants of labour migration after graduation. We find that not only wage gains are driving the migration decision, but also differences in labour market opportunities, past migration experience and international student exchange are strong predictors of future migration. Contrary to our expectations, job characteristics such as the utilisation of skills in the job and involvement in innovation hardly affect the migration decision. When analysing country choice, countries such as the USA, Canada and Australia appear to attract migrants due to their larger R&D intensity. Moreover, graduates with higher grades are more likely to migrate to these countries.

Keywords:

• migration
• university graduates
• scientists and engineers

JEL Classification :

• F22
• J61

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jim Allen, Frank Cörvers and the participants at the workshop on the Labour Market for Scientists and Engineers at the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA), and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.

Notes

See http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/llp/erasmus/statisti/table207.pdf

They show that the lack of funds for research is an important push factor for migration to the USA, that work experience abroad is a pull factor for migration to continental Europe, and that holding a PhD from outside Italy is a pull factor for migration to the UK.

For more information on the REFLEX project, see Allen and van der Velden (2008). The survey was conducted in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Due to missing variables, Estonia is excluded in the regression analysis. For some countries, a two-stage sampling process was applied: universities were drawn in the first stage and graduates from these universities in the second stage. When central registers of graduates were available, graduates were selected by a one-stage sampling process directly from the records. For all countries, the final sample was checked against the population. Only small deviations of the sample means from the population means could be detected.

When using the standard definition of migration, the number of migrants is higher than the 3.1% reported in Table 3: 5.6% of all graduates in our sample start their first job in a country different from their country of birth.

Persons who graduated in doctoral studies are excluded; master graduates who start their doctoral studies are included in the sample though.

Internships and jobs shorter than 6 months are not included in the analysis.

Wages are corrected for differences in purchasing power across countries.

Because R&D intensity is clustered within destination countries, the standard errors are corrected accordingly.

The question on utilisation of skills is ‘To what extent were your knowledge and skills utilised in this work?’ The variable is measured on a five-point Likert scale.

Descriptive statistics of the data used are shown in Table 2.

A negligible fraction of graduates who migrate to other countries than the EU, USA, Canada or Australia are omitted from the analysis.

From this group, less than 9% are graduates who return to their country of birth.

A slight under-representation of migrants in the REFLEX data may also be due to the sampling method used: graduates going abroad may be less likely to respond or are less likely to be identified by their university.

Alternatively, we could model the bivariate migration choice for the first and the current job. The added value of this approach is, however, small because both choices are strongly correlated and not all covariates of interest are available for both jobs.

The measure of relative grades which is used in this study is based on a self-assessment.

We corrected the standard errors of the estimates to account for the fact that we have repeated measurements of the same individuals.

Involvement in innovation is not included in this model as it is only defined for the current job.