Does More Schooling Make You Run for the Border? Evidence from Post-independence Kosovo

Does an extra year of schooling augment one's propensity to migrate? In a naive regression, which does not account for the potentialr everse causality and omitted variables, the coefficient of education is likely to be biased. To deal with the problems of endogeneity, we use parental education as an instrument for own education. The data come from a survey on preparedness to emigrate from Kosovo, carried out in an extra year of education increases the probability of taking concrete steps to realize the migration intentions by 8 percentage points. This finding is policy relevant in that it informs potential policy design - be it toward retention or 'export' of the highly skilled, depending on whether policymakers subscribe to the 'brain drain' or 'brain gain' view of emigration.