Top Talent, Elite Colleges, and Migration: Evidence from the Indian Institutes of Technology / Prithwiraj Choudhury, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaulé.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Choudhury, Prithwiraj.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Ganguli, Ina.

Gaulé, Patrick.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w31308.

NBER working paper series no. w31308

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2023.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Print version record

June 2023.