International mobility and wages: an analysis of Italian Ph.D. graduates

Following a recent stream of research that focuses on the migration of high-skilled workers, this paper examines the wage performance of two cohorts of Italian Ph.D. graduates associated with international mobility. After controlling for the endogeneity of the migration decision, we find that labor mobility is associated with higher wages and that selection on unobservable traits is essential to address the issue of the returns to migration. Additionally, we do not find evidence of individual heterogeneity in the response of wages to migration. We also show that our results are always confirmed when we include two exclusion restrictions in the empirical model and when we restrict the analysis to different subpopulations