Education, Migration, and the Returns to Schooling

This project aims to understand the relationship between human capital accumulation, migration, and the returns to schooling. In particular, we are looking to answer four closely related research questions: First, how strongly are post-secondary educational decisions tied to local labor market returns to education? Second, how do local labor market conditions affect educational migration decisions? Third, how does migration for college affect “brain drain” from rural areas. Fourth, how does migration for college affect the spatial distribution of human capital and the recent rise in human capital agglomeration in many urban settings?