A Meta-Analysis Of The Impact Of Education On Migration

This paper represents a clear departure from the migration literature and a first attempt in applying a meta-analysis on the impact of education on migration behaviour. A three-part meta-analysis is applied on twenty-two rigorously selected studies examining education as one of the determinants of migration. The first part, the standard meta-analysis, finds that most of the effect sizes or the impact of the education variable to bepositive, i.e. indicating that the more educated tend towards migrating. The summary impact of the education coefficient estimate is found to have a magnitude of approximately +0.300. The second part of the meta-analysis checks for publication bias; formal tests suggest no evidence of such bias in our meta-analysis. In the final part, a meta-regression is used to account for the source of heterogeneity in the coefficient estimates between studies, in which six of the study characteristics are found significant.