Migration is an important and yet neglected determinant of institutions.The paper documents the channels through which emigration a¤ects home country institutions and considers dynamic-panel regressions for a large sample of developing countries. We …nd that emigration and human capital both increase democracy and economic freedom. This implies that unskilled (skilled) emigration has a positive (ambiguous) impact on institutional quality. Simulations show an impact of skilled emigration that is generally positive, signi…cant for a few countries in the short run and for many countries in the long run once incentive e¤ects of emigration on human capital formation are accounted for.JEL codes: O1, F22.

In this paper, we provide new estimates of skilled workers' emigration rates for about 190 countries in 2000 and 170 countries in 1990, including both developing and industrial countries. Using various statistical sources, we revisit Carrington and Detragiache's measures by incorporating information on immigrants' educational attainment and country of origin from almost all OECD countries. Our database covers 92.7 percent of the OECD immigration stock. In absolute terms, we show that the largest numbers of highly educated migrants are from Europe, Southern and Eastern Asia and, to a lesser extent, Central America. Nevertheless, as a proportion of the potential educated labor force, the highest brain drain rates are observed in the Caribbean, Central America, Western and Eastern Africa. Repeating the exercise for 1990 and 2000 allows us to evaluate the changes in brain drain intensity. Western Africa, Eastern Africa and Central America experienced a remarkable increase in the brain drain during the past decade.JEL Classi…cation: F22, J61.

In this study we use cross-country bilateral data to quantify a twostep process of international migration and its aggregate determinants. We first analyze which country-specific factors affect the probability that individuals join the pool of potential (aspiring) migrants. Then we consider the bilateral and destination country factors that affect the frequency at which potential migrants turn into actual migrants. Using information on potential migrants from World Gallup surveys and on actual migrants from national censuses for 138 origin countries and 30 major destinations between 2000 and 2010, we analyze economic, policy, cultural and network determinants of each step. We find that the size of the network of previous migrants and the average income per person at destination are crucial determinants of the size of the pool of potential migrants. Economic growth in the destination country, on the other hand, is the main economic generator of migration opportunities for a given pool of potential migrants. We also find that college educated exhibit greater actual emigration rates mainly * We thank the editors and three referees for their helpful remarks and suggestions. We acknowledge financial support from the ARC convention on "Geographical Mobility of Factors" (convention 09/14-019). We also gratefully thank Robert Manchin and the Gallupinitiated Institute for Advanced Behavioural Studies for allowing us access to the data for research purposes. Correspondence: Frédéric Docquier (frederic.docquier@uclouvain.be), Giovanni Peri (gperi@ucdavis.edu) and Ilse Ruyssen (ilse.ruyssen@uclouvain.be). 1 because of better chances in realizing their immigration potentials, rather than because of higher willingness to migrate.