Publications
Publications
- Forthcoming
- Journal of Development Economics
Top Talent, Elite Colleges, and Migration: Evidence from the Indian Institutes of Technology
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Ina Ganguli and Patrick Gaulé
Abstract
We study migration in the right tail of the talent distribution using a novel dataset of Indian high school students taking the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), a college entrance exam used for admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). We find a high incidence of migration after students complete college: among the top 1,000 scorers on the exam, 36% have migrated abroad, rising to 62% for the top 100 scorers. We next document that students who attended the original “Top 5” Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) were 5 percentage points more likely to migrate for graduate school compared to equally talented students who studied in other institutions. We explore two mechanisms for these patterns: signaling, for which we study migration after one university suddenly gained the IIT designation; and alumni networks, using information on the location of IIT alumni in U.S. computer science departments
Keywords
Citation
Choudhury, Prithwiraj, Ina Ganguli, and Patrick Gaulé. "Top Talent, Elite Colleges, and Migration: Evidence from the Indian Institutes of Technology." Journal of Development Economics (forthcoming).