Endogenous Skill Formation and the Source Country Effects of Emigration

Hartmut Egger () and Gabriel Felbermayr

No 308/2009, Diskussionspapiere aus dem Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre der Universität Hohenheim from Department of Economics, University of Hohenheim, Germany

Abstract: In this paper we set up a simple theoretical framework to study the possible source country effects of skilled labor emigration. We show that for given technologies, labor market integration necessarily lowers GDP per capita in a poor source country of emigration, because it distorts the education decision of individuals. As pointed out by our analysis, a negative source country effect also materializes if all agents face identical emigration probabilities, irrespective of their education levels. This is in sharp contrast to the case of exogenous skill supply. Allowing for human capital spillovers, we further show that with social returns to schooling there may be a counteracting positive source country effect if the prospect of emigration stimulates the incentives to acquire education. Since, in general, the source country effects are not clear, we calibrate our model for four major source countries - Mexico, Turkey, Morocco, and the Philippines - and show that an increase in emigration rates beyond those observed in the year 2000 is very likely to lower GDP per capita in poor economies.

Keywords: Emigration; endogenous skill formation; source country effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2009-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dev, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.uni-hohenheim.de/RePEc/hoh/papers/308.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.uni-hohenheim.de/RePEc/hoh/papers/308.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.uni-hohenheim.de/RePEc/hoh/papers/308.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://projekte.uni-hohenheim.de/RePEc/hoh/papers/308.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Endogenous skill formation and the source country effects of emigration (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hoh:hohdip:308

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Diskussionspapiere aus dem Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre der Universität Hohenheim from Department of Economics, University of Hohenheim, Germany Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ulrike Berberich ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).