International Emigrant Selection on Occupational Skills
CID Research Fellow & Graduate Student Working Paper No. 84
Alexander Patt, Jens Ruhose, Simon Wiederhold, and Miguel Flores
June 2017
Abstract:
We present the first evidence that international emigrant selection on education and earnings materializes through occupational skills. Combining novel data from a representative Mexican task survey with rich individual-level worker data, we find that Mexican migrants to the United States have higher manual skills and lower cognitive skills than non-migrants. Conditional on occupational skills, education and earnings no longer predict migration decisions. Differential labor-market returns to occupational skills explain the observed selection pattern and significantly outperform previously used returns-to-skills measures in predicting migration. Results are persistent over time and hold within narrowly defined regional, sectoral, and occupational labor markets.
JEL codes: F22, O15, J61, J24
Affiliated Program: Growth Lab