The effect of occupation-specific brain drain on human capital

This paper tests the hypothesis of a beneficial brain drain using occupation-specific data on migration from developing countries to OECD countries around 2000. Distinguishing between several types of human capital allows to assess whether the impact of high-skilled south-north migration on human capital in the sending economies differed across occupational groups requiring tertiary education. We find a robust negative effect of the incidence of high-skilled emigration on the level of human capital in the sending countries, thereby rejecting the hypothesis of a beneficial brain drain. The negative effect was significantly stronger for professionals - the occupational category with the largest incidence of south-north migration and the highest educational requirements - than for technicians and associate professionals. --International migration,Occupation-specific brain drain,Human capital,Transferability of skills,Beneficial brain drain

Occupation-specific south-north migration

This paper presents occupation-specific data on south-north migration around the year 2000 using employment data for developing sending and OECD receiving countries from ILO and OECD. These data reveal that the incidence of south-north migration was highest among professionals, one of the two occupational categories generally requiring tertiary education, and among clerks and legislators, senior officials and managers. At a more disaggregated level, I find that the probability that a professional in the OECD worked as a physical, mathematical and engineering science professional or as a life science and health professional was significantly larger for south-north migrants compared to OECD natives. It is exactly these occupational categories, characterized by internationally transferable skills, that exhibited significantly larger brain drain rates than teaching professionals, whose skills are rather country-specific. The employment shares of most types of professionals and technicians and associate professionals, as well as of clerks and corporate managers were significantly smaller in the migrant-sending countries compared to the receiving countries. The data further suggest a non-negligible brain waste due to imperfect transferability of skills acquired through formal education, since south-north migrants with a university degree more often worked in occupational categories requiring less than tertiary education compared to OECD natives. --international migration,brain drain,human capital,transferability of skills,occupational employment structure

Hopping in a Supercooled Lennard-Jones Liquid: Metabasins, Waiting Time Distribution, and Diffusion

We investigate the jump motion among potential energy minima of a Lennard-Jones model glass former by extensive computer simulation. From the time series of minima energies, it becomes clear that the energy landscape is organized in superstructures, called metabasins. We show that diffusion can be pictured as a random walk among metabasins, and that the whole temperature dependence resides in the distribution of waiting times. The waiting time distribution exhibits algebraic decays: $\tau^{-1/2}$ for very short times and $\tau^{-\alpha}$ for longer times, where $\alpha\approx2$ near $T_c$. We demonstrate that solely the waiting times in the very stable basins account for the temperature dependence of the diffusion constant.Comment: to be published in Phys. Rev.