Three essays on the determinants and outcomes of student migration

In this thesis I examine the movement of tertiary students and the intended (or unintended) benefits it can bring. The first chapter starts with a less commonly known benefit to student exchanges, their ability to boost bilateral trade. The idea that immigrants can stimulate trade, however, is not new. Often, the literature finds that immigrants alleviate informal barriers to trade. But unlike other immigrants, international students make a special case because of their short stay and high education level. Leveraging panel data on 34 host countries and 172 origin countries between 2000 and 2018, I employ a gravity-type trade model to re-examine this notion. I find that international students increase their host countries’ trade with their origin country. Further, while their ability to foster the most information-intensive trades is limited relative to the average immigrant, international students have an advantage in promoting trust between institutionally distant countries. Consequently, I explore how countries can attract (or repel) international talent. Doing so, the second chapter examines the impact of Brexit on international student migration. In a structural gravity model, I estimate student migration between 69 countries for counterfactual scenarios in which the United Kingdom leaves the European Union one year before the referendum. This exercise reveals a decrease in exchange students studying in the UK of around 3.8% to 4.9%. While the number of non-EU students to the UK rises, a drop in EU student numbers drives this result. Similarly, 30% to 38% fewer UK students choose to study abroad. The estimated changes in international student stocks show that most other member countries lose international students and non-EU countries host more than without Brexit. My findings provide evidence that there may be hidden costs to Brexit affecting global student exchanges that we have yet to see. In the third chapter, my co-author Ron Davies and I examine the elasticity of foreign students to tuition. By definition, international students are a mobile and willing to migrate to a foreign country to study. This means, however, that policies affecting foreign students can have indirect implications for students across the globe. We study whether the introduction of general and non-EEA study fees discourage foreign students from immigrating leveraging variation between and within higher-education institutions. We find that introducing tuition discourages international student enrolment. Further, we show that fee policies can have distributive consequences with fewer students coming from less developed countries.