Choudhury, PrithwirajGanguli, InaGaulé, Patrick2024-05-232023-09Choudhury, Prithwiraj, Ina Ganguli, and Patrick Gaulé. "Top Talent, Elite Colleges, and Migration: Evidence from the Indian Institutes of Technology." Art. 103120. Journal of Development Economics 164 (September 2023).0304-3878https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37378645We study migration in the right tail of the talent distribution using a novel dataset of Indian high school students taking the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), a college entrance exam used for admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). We find a high incidence of migration after students complete college: among the top 1,000 scorers on the exam, 36% have migrated abroad, rising to 62% for the top 100 scorers. We next document that students who attended the original “Top 5” Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) were 5 percentage points more likely to migrate for graduate school compared to equally talented students who studied in other institutions. We explore two mechanisms for these patterns: signaling, for which we study migration after one university suddenly gained the IIT designation; and alumni networks, using information on the location of IIT alumni in U.S. computer science departments.en-USEconomics and EconometricsDevelopmentJournal Article2024-05-2310.1016/j.jdeveco.2023.103120