Migration patterns and job satisfaction: evidence from European doctorate holders
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Migration patterns and job satisfaction: evidence from European doctorate holders Sarah Jewell1 · Pantelis Kazakis2 Received: 6 January 2020 / Accepted: 11 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The aim of this study was to disentangle the role migration plays in several job satisfaction dimensions for academic researchers. We employ a novel database, MORE2, to track the migratory behaviour of European doctorate holders and use a multinomial treatment model to deal with selections bias. We find that more migratory individuals demonstrate higher levels of job satisfaction across several dimensions. These findings are in line with the hypothesis that economic agents who migrate more are better at processing information and find more suitable employment. JEL Classification I26 · J28 · J61 · R23
1 Introduction A large body of the economics literature has dealt with the phenomenon of migration, whereby the focus has been to analyse the mechanisms under which individuals decide whether to migrate, along with the pecuniary outcomes of such an action. In recent decades, with the increase in international migration of individuals with tertiary education, a subset of migration literature has put the spotlight onto skilled workers.1 From an economics perspective, this is important, since the migration of highly skilled individuals is perceived as a mechanism to diffuse and develop new 1 For recent reviews see Czaika and Parsons (2017) and Kerr et al. (2016). Specifically, for the case of OECD countries, for the years 2000/2001 and 2010/2011, immigration of individuals with tertiary education has increased about 70% (Arslan et al. 2014).
* Pantelis Kazakis [email protected] Sarah Jewell [email protected] 1
University of Reading, Reading, UK
2
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
13
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ideas, share knowledge and increase innovation. Among the skilled workers, academics and researchers are a sub-group who are internationally very mobile (Hunter et al. 2009; Ioannidis 2004; Trippl 2013) but also driven by non-economic factors. Not only do these people increase knowledge sharing by moving to another country, but they also do so with short visits, such as visiting positions, conferences, co-authoring with people from other countries and co-patenting. In that sense, academic researchers are different from the general population of skilled workers in that their moves are not necessarily permanent (Newland 2009) and again not always economically motivated.2 Important for our study is the view that migration can be perceived as a form of investment in human capital (Sjaastad 1962).3 Different aspects of a person’s life change considerably when migration takes place. This is because an individual, through migration for example, may attend a better educational institution, or find a more appropriate job that matches her abilities. Highly skilled economic agents will have higher motives to try and reap the rewards of their long and on-going process of investm
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