The World Bank Economic Review Advance Access published online on June 1, 2007
The World Bank Economic Review, doi:10.1093/wber/lhm007
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Measuring International Skilled Migration: A New Database Controlling for Age of Entry
Michel Beine is professor of economics at the University of Luxemburg and at Université Libre de Bruxelles and a research fellow at the Center for Economic Studies, Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich; his email address is mbeine{at}ulb.ac.be
Frédéric Docquier is a research associate at the Belgian National Fund for Economic Research, professor of economics at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (Bonn) and the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College London; his email address is docquier{at}ires.ucl.ac.be
Hillel Rapoport (corresponding author) is senior lecturer in economics at Bar-Ilan University, a member of EQUIPPE, Universités de Lille (EA CNRS 4018), and a research fellow at the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College London; his email address is hillel{at}mail.biu.ac.il
JEL codes: F22, J24
Recent data on international migration of skilled workers define skilled migrants by education level without distinguishing whether they acquired their education in the home or the host country. This article uses immigrants' age of entry as a proxy for where they acquired their education. Data on age of entry are available from a subset of receiving countries that together represent 77 percent of total skilled immigration to countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Using these data and a simple gravity model to estimate the age-of-entry structure of the remaining 23 percent, alternative brain drain measures are proposed that exclude immigrants who arrived before ages 12, 18, and 22.