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International mobility and wages: an analysis of Italian Ph.D. graduates

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Abstract

Following a recent stream of research that focuses on the migration of high-skilled workers, this paper examines the wage performance of two cohorts of Italian Ph.D. graduates associated with international mobility. After controlling for the endogeneity of the migration decision, we find that labor mobility is associated with higher wages and that selection on unobservable traits is essential to address the issue of the returns to migration. Additionally, we do not find evidence of individual heterogeneity in the response of wages to migration. We also show that our results are always confirmed when we include two exclusion restrictions in the empirical model and when we restrict the analysis to different subpopulations.

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Notes

  1. Recently, Hunt (2011) has documented for the USA that skilled immigrants not only achieve success in terms of private productivity, as measured by their wage, but also in terms of creating, disseminating and commercializing knowledge.

  2. The labor market of Ph.D.s is not restricted anymore to the education sector. This is normal in the American tradition, but quite new for European countries, where the Ph.D. has been mainly perceived as a training prerequisite for an academic career.

  3. For instance, the EU Council Directive 2009/50/EC introduced the Blue Card, a simplified work permit allowing high-skilled non-EU citizens to work in EU countries.

  4. The only existing study based on Italian data is the one by Ballarino and Colombo (2010). The study is based on data collected for three universities located in the North and focuses on occupational outcomes rather than the migration experience of Ph.D.s.

  5. See, for example, Topel and Ward (1992) and Détang-Dessendre et al. (2004).

  6. For a survey on program evaluation methods and advances, see Imbens and Wooldridge (2009).

  7. The rates of holding a job for Ph.D.s who graduated in 2004 and 2006 are, respectively, 94.1 and 92.70 %.

  8. Of the remaining unemployed Ph.D.s, 350 declared they could not find a job, 107 do not work because of personal related issues and 143 do not work for not reported reasons.

  9. An alternative approach would be to model the migration decision in a multinomial context and correct for selectivity in a more accurate way as in Lee (1983) and Dahl (2002). Unfortunately, the number of observations for each possible destination is low given the small fraction of total movers in our data. Thus, we decided to apply a simpler model that still account for selectivity.

  10. See Wooldridge (2010).

  11. Gibson and McKenzie (2011), for instance, find that students who study a foreign language are more likely to move abroad.

  12. Graduates were interviewed by a computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI).

  13. In particular, the response rate of those who have obtained the degree in 2006 is almost 72 %, while it is slightly over 67 % for those who graduated in 2004.

  14. Italian Ph.D. programs have a fixed duration, but allow for the possibility of an extra year to complete the thesis.

  15. See Ciriaci (2014) for a similar approach.

  16. All these variables are categorical and with the following categories: at least four, less than three but more than zero.

  17. Results are omitted to ease the readability of the table, but are available upon request.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the Italian National Institute of Statistics for supplying us with the data.

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  1. University of Salento, c/o Centro Ecotekne, Via per Monteroni, 73100, Lecce, Italy

    Marco Di Cintio & Emanuele Grassi

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  1. Marco Di Cintio
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  2. Emanuele Grassi
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Correspondence to Marco Di Cintio.

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Di Cintio, M., Grassi, E. International mobility and wages: an analysis of Italian Ph.D. graduates. Ann Reg Sci 59, 759–791 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-016-0749-6

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