The role of international student mobility in hiring decisions. A vignette experiment among German employers

Abstract

By virtue of the internationalisation of economies, international student mobility is considered increasingly important for professional careers. However, most studies focus on the supply-side by using graduate surveys, which face problems of graduates’ self-selection. Other studies on employers’ opinions often lack rigour analysis and report ambiguous results. Combining a general matching approach with theories on human capital and sorting, studying abroad can impact both the decision on hiring and the decision on international assignment. To solve problems of endogeneity and to consider employers’ perspectives directly, a vignette experiment is applied. Hypothetical applicants, with systematically varied higher education credentials, are randomly presented to a sample of German employers, in order to simulate a screening situation. Results show that study abroad experience is more important for international assignment, than for hiring. While it does not interact with final grades, it can be markedly substituted by professional work experience, when employers consider international assignment. In turn, professional work experience can be somewhat substituted by study abroad experience, when employers consider hiring. At least in the German institutional context, international student mobility may rather serve as a signal of transnational human capital, than as a signal of general job-performance.

Keywords:

• Factorial survey
• international student mobility
• recruitment
• transnational human capital
• vignette experiment

Notes

1. We also varied graduate’s gender, host country, duration abroad, organisation, financing, and reputation of the host university. However, for the sake of complexity we only considered final grades, work experience, and whether a vignette consists of a period abroad or not, in this study. Due to experimental balancing, the varied dimensions can be investigated separately without biases.

2. These were: jobworld.de, Berliner Morgenpost, Die Zeit, Die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Handelsblatt, Hamburger Abendblatt, Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, Kölner Stadtanzeiger, Leipziger Volkszeitung Märkische Allgemeine, Münchner Merkur, Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, Nordkurier, Nürnberger Nachrichten, Sueddeutsche, Tageszeitung, Thüringer Allgemeine, Weser Kurier.

3. While the response rate is low, this is quite normal in employer surveys, especially if conduced online. Three participants judged only seven instead of eight vignettes.

4. Due to the size of the decks, only the intercept is estimated with a random component. Possible non-modelled heteroscedasticity is corrected by robust standard errors (Huber-White).

5. For reasons of clarity and intuitive interpretation, we present the theoretically relevant vignette effects and use graphical visualisations, while full tables are reported in the appendix. The estimation weights are plotted as points and the 95% confidence intervals as (dashed) lines. The greater the distance between a point and the zero line, the greater the effect.