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Returning to the Question of a Wage Premium for Returning Migrants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

Alan Barrett  and
Jean Goggin
Alan Barrett*
Affiliation:
Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin
Jean Goggin
Affiliation:
Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin
*
E-mail: Alan.Barrett@esri.ie
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Abstract

Using data from a large-scale survey of employees in Ireland, we estimate the extent to which people who have emigrated from Ireland and returned earn more relative to comparable people who have never lived abroad. In so doing, we test the hypothesis that migration can be part of a process of human capital formation. We find through OLS estimation that returners earn 7 per cent more than comparable stayers. We test for the presence of self-selection bias in this estimate but the tests suggest that the premium is related to returner status. The premium holds for both genders, is higher for people with postgraduate degrees and for people who migrated beyond the EU to the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The results show how emigration can be positive for a source country when viewed in a longer-term context.

Keywords

Return migrationcircular migrationIrelandJ61F22
Type
Research Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 213 , July 2010 , pp. R43 - R51
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

The authors would like to acknowledge helpful discussions with Stephen Drinkwater, Daniel Hamermesh and Séamus McGuinness and participants at an ESRI seminar. We would also like to acknowledge the funding provided by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences under the Government of Ireland Thematic Research Project Grants Scheme. Finally, we would like to thank Mary Smyth of the Central Statistics Office for facilitating access to the data.

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