Does Brain Drain Lead to Institutional Gain?

2016/06/01 by Xiaoyang Li, John McHale, Xuan Zhou · 3 citations
Social Sciences · #Culture, Economy, and Development Studies #Migration and Labor Dynamics #Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies #Emigration #Human capital #Endowment #Brain drain #Economics #Argument (complex analysis) #Estimation #Politics #Instrumental variable #Quality (philosophy) #Capital (architecture) #Labour economics #Demographic economics #Economic growth #Political science #Geography #Econometrics

paper · doi:10.1111/twec.12407

openalex publication_date 2016/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11

Abstract

Abstract A country's endowment of human capital affects its institutions through various channels. This raises the possibility that skilled emigration can leave its mark on a country's institutional development. We explore the impact of emigrant human capital on home country's institutional quality. Using geographical and genetic distance‐based instrumental variables for emigration and a dynamic panel estimation method, we find that human capital emigration helps the home country's political institutions, but hurts economic institutions. The conventional ‘brain drain’ argument, therefore, needs to incorporate the institutional changes due to skilled labour emigration.

Citations

• Chapter 6 Institutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth
• Some Tests of Specification for Panel Data: Monte Carlo Evidence and an Application to Employment Equations
• Do Migrants Improve Governance at Home? Evidence from a Voting Experiment
• Brain Drain and Human Capital Formation in Developing Countries: Winners and Losers
• Do Migrants Remit Democracy? International Migration, Political Beliefs, and Behavior in Mexico
• Genes, peoples, and languages

Cited by

• Does emigration reduce corruption?
• Exit, Voice, and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States
• Human capital flight [wikipedia]