Top talent, elite colleges, and migration: evidence from the Indian Institutes of Technology

Choudhury, P., Ganguli, I. & Gaulé, P. (2023). Top talent, elite colleges, and migration: evidence from the Indian Institutes of Technology. Journal of Development Economics, 164, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2023.103120
Copy

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 1000 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” 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.
Item Type Article
Copyright holders © 2023 The Author(s)
Departments LSE
DOI 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2023.103120
Date Deposited 10 Jul 2025
Acceptance Date 22 May 2023
URI https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/128766

Explore Further

picture_as_pdf
subject
Published Version
Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0
Download

Export as

EndNote BibTeX Reference Manager Refer Atom Dublin Core JSON Multiline CSV
Export

Downloads
View more statistics