Professional Networks and High-Skilled Migration: The Historical and the Contemporaneous Perspective
Project period: January 2021 - January 2024
Research Areas:
Tasks
This project is part of the DFG Collaborative Research Center Transregio “Rationality & Competition”. It will analyze whether and how professional networks facilitate international migration. In the neoclassical literature on migration, the decision to migrate is solely determined by wage differentials between the home and destination countries. Yet, wage differentials are not the only significant factor to influence an individual’s decision to migrate. Information about job perspectives and everyday life in the potential destination country can be equally important. Professional networks are key to transmit such information and, evidently, information received through a network may help individuals to correct their potentially biased beliefs about the subjectively important factors that drive their decisions. However, individuals may also receive biased signals through the network, which may, in turn, lead to biased beliefs and may affect labor market decisions in the long run. The project will study the role of professional networks from a historical and a contemporaneous perspective. In both perspectives, the PIs and their team will measure professional networks at an unprecedented level of detail. For the historical perspective, they will study how networks affected the emigration of Jewish high-skilled individuals from Nazi Germany, one of the largest emigration waves of high-skilled individuals in history. For the contemporaneous perspective, they will analyze large online databases that allow analyzing professional networks and international migration decisions of high-skilled individuals with contemporaneous data.