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

Choudhury, Prithwiraj, Ganguli, Ina and Gaulé, Patrick (2023) Top talent, elite colleges, and migration: evidence from the Indian Institutes of Technology. Journal of Development Economics, 164. ISSN 0304-3878

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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 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
Additional Information:	© 2023 The Author(s)
Divisions:	LSE
Subjects:	L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
Date Deposited:	10 Jul 2025 11:57
Last Modified:	10 Jul 2025 16:03
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/128766

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