International Mobility of Academics: Theory and Evidence

The labour force in the university sector of many countries is extremely international. I propose a theoretical model to study cross border academic mobility, where academics bargain with institutions over pay and choose the countries where they live and work to maximise their lifetime utility. I then test the model on a sample of well over 900,000 research active academics over 33 years. The model predicts how academics respond both to changes in external conditions, including exchange rate fluctuations, and to changes in their record, measured by their publications and their citations. The theoretical predictions are confirmed by the empirical analysis.