Brain Drain and Immigration Policy

Here’s an interesting presentation at UC San Diego on the matter of brain drain and immigration:

The Importance of Brain Return in the Brain Drain-Brain Gain Debate
Karin Mayr
Assistant Professor of Economics, Johannes Kepler University of Linz (Austria), Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics, UC Davis
Tuesday, April 8, 3:00 PM
Eleanor Roosevelt College Administration Building
Conference Room 115, First Floor
Reception to follow
Recent theoretical and empirical studies have emphasized the fact that the perspective of international migration increases the expected returns to skills in poor countries, linking the possibility of migrating (brain drain) with incentives to higher education (brain gain). If emigration is uncertain and some of the highly educated remain such channel may, at least in part, counterbalance the negative effects of brain drain. Recent empirical evidence, moreover, seems to show that temporary (rather than permanent) migration is prevalent among highly skilled from middle towards high income countries (such as Eastern to Western Europe and Latin America to the US). This paper develops a tractable overlapping-generations-model that provides a rationale for return migration and predicts who will migrate and return among agents with heterogeneous abilities. We use parameter values from the literature and the data on return migration to quantify the effect of increased openness on human capital and wages of the sending countries. We find, for plausible values of the parameters, that the ”brain return” channel is at least as important as the ”incentive” channel in promoting brain gain in the sending country.
Karin Mayr joined the Economics Department at UC Davis as a Visiting Assistant Professor in August 2007 from the Economics Department at the University of Linz, Austria, where she also received her PhD in 2004. She has previously spent visiting appointments at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom and Trinity College, Ireland. She is a member of the European Migration Network at the International Organisation for Migration. Her research interests are in international migration, public economics and political economy.
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These seminars are open to all members of the UCSD community, as well as faculty and students from other universities and the general public. For directions to CCIS, visit our website. Parking permits can be purchased at the information booth on North Point Drive (north end of campus). Visitors may also use metered parking spaces (max. 2 hours) in the North side parking lot. Papers previously presented at CCIS seminars can also be downloaded from our website under “Working Papers.” For further information, please contact Ana Minvielle (E-mail: aminvielle@ucsd.edu, Tel#: 858-822-4447).

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