Laboratory

Migration and Mobility

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Research Area

High-Skilled Migration

High-skilled migration plays a crucial role for the vitality of modern economies. It constitutes a substantial and growing component of international migration flows, with significant impacts on economic growth, employment, and societal transformations. Understanding the underlying mechanisms driving high-skilled migration thus is paramount for the design and implementation of appropriate migration policies in both receiving and sending countries. However, measuring the trends and determinants of high-skilled migration is often constrained by insufficient data. Digital trace data complement more established data sources and enable researchers to shed new light on the mobility patterns of highly educated and highly skilled migrants.  

Projects in this research area leverage large-scale digital traces from social networking services and bibliometric databases in order to advance our understanding of the determinants and consequences of the patterns and trajectories of the mobility of high-skilled migrants.

A core set of projects centers around the Scholarly Migration Database, a new database we produced and maintain to document scientific mobility patterns and trends over time. We developed new methods to estimate the migration of scientists who published in scientific journals indexed by Scopus, using information about changes in their institutional affiliations over time. This resulted in a micro-level longitudinal database for the period 1996–2021 and a macro-level data set that includes estimates of aggregate-level migration flows. The database is global in scope and flexible enough to allow for analyses at the subnational level. Among other things, we leveraged these data to shed light on the relationship between economic development and the migration of scholars, to assess and monitor gender disparities in academic mobility, and to measure and model return migration as well as the impact of external shocks, such as the Brexit, on scholarly mobility. 

A second set of projects looks at high-skilled migration more broadly. In particular, we retrieved digital trace data from the social networking service LinkedIn to capture the migration dynamics of professionals across Europe and the globe. Among other things, we leveraged features of the LinkedIn data to measure proxies for migration aspirations of professionals in Europe. We identified the relative attractiveness for relocation to various European countries, and we aim at assessing the extent to which migration intentions of professionals match actual relocations. As we develop our models to evaluate the drivers and outcomes of high-skilled migration, we also carefully assess the type of information that can be accurately derived from such online platforms. This enables us to offer broader generalizations that go beyond the specific platform.

Projects of this Research Area