Migrants' Destination Choice: The Effect of Education

Sammanfattning: The excess demand of highly educated workers stands in contrast to the disproportional representation of low skilled workers in unemployment rates. Skill-level compositions of immigrant flows play a pivotal role in stimulating investments and economic growth. Destination countries are thereby faced with the challenging task of influencing their relative attractiveness. This study investigates the impact of education on migrants' destination choices so as to provide adequate knowledge regarding the preferences of highly educated migrants. A probit approach is used to regress the share of tertiary educated in source-destination combinations on a set of independent variables. The evidence indicates that highly educated people are less affected by indirect costs such as social distance and attitude towards migrants among the destination population. In contrast, policies aimed to facilitate entrance into the labour market are found to increase the share of tertiary educated. One of the most intriguing findings is that tertiary educated migrants exhibit a more positive attitude towards higher tax rates. A further look at the preferences for government expenditures suggest that grants and spending aimed to uphold a minimum standard of living for individuals have a negative impact on the share of tertiary educated, whereas spending on areas benefiting the general public is found to have a positive effect.