Top Talent, Elite Colleges, and Migration: Evidence from the Indian Institutes of Technology /

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...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
1. Verfasser:
Choudhury, Prithwiraj
Körperschaft:
National Bureau of Economic Research
Weitere Verfasser:
Ganguli, Ina, Gaulé, Patrick
Format:
Elektronisch E-Book
Sprache:
Englisch
Veröffentlicht:
Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2023.
Zusammenfassung:
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.
Umfang:
1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
Anmerkungen:
June 2023.
Schlagworte: