Analyse en identification partielle de la décision d'émigrer des étudiants africains
This paper studies the decision made by a family to invest in student migration and the consequences of the migration of skilled individuals for the sending country. We propose an empirical structural decision model which reflects the importance of both the return of the investment and the budget constraint in agent choices. Taking advantage of recent advances in the treatment of identification problems in IV-discrete choice models, we circumvent the problem of endogeneity of the educational attainment and conduct inference for the parameters of interest. The data are collected on students from Cameroon, using a new snowball sampling procedure, which allow the inclusion of both migrants and non-migrants in the sample. We propose bias corrected estimators for this procedure. We study the characteristics of potential candidates to migration that increase or decrease their probability to migrate. We also test for existence of a brain gain effect in Cameroon. The results show that educational attainment in tertiary education is not positively correlated with the prospect of migration, invalidating the brain gain hypothesis.