Working Paper: NBER ID: w31308
Authors: Prithwiraj Choudhury; Ina Ganguli; Patrick Gaul
Abstract: 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.
Keywords: migration; elite colleges; Indian Institutes of Technology; talent distribution; signaling
JEL Codes: F22; J61; O33; O38
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| JEE exam performance (I26) | migration likelihood (J61) |
| Attending top 5 IITs (L00) | migration likelihood (J61) |
| BHU gaining IIT status (I23) | migration likelihood (J61) |
| Presence of IIT alumni in US CS departments (L86) | likelihood of IIT graduates attending for PhDs (Y40) |
| Attending elite universities (D29) | signaling quality to employers and graduate programs (J24) |