What Drives Knowledge Migration

This thesis investigates the factors that influence the migration of highly educated people between developed countries. A panel regression is run on the database consisting of the number of foreign born in the 28 selected OECD countries, specified by the country of birth and education level. The explanatory factors studied are indicators of average income, job security, income equality, specific government expenditures, knowledge intensity, taxes and other barriers. The results show that the highly educated migrants value job security and government expenditure on education. Governments should consider these factors when creating policies to attract foreign talent