Does More Schooling Make You Run for the Border? Evidence from Post-Independence Kosovo

Does an extra year of schooling augment one's propensity to migrate? In a naive regression, which does not account for the potential reverse causality and omitted variables, the coefficient of education is likely to be biased. To deal with the problems of endogeneity, we use parental education as an instrument for own education. The data come from a survey on preparedness to emigrate from Kosovo, carried out in the summer of 2008. Two-stage residual inclusion multinomial probit results suggest that an extra year of education increases the probability of taking concrete steps to realise migration intentions by up to 9 percentage points.