Governance, Brain Drain, and Brain Gain in Elite Academic Institutions in Economics : the Case of Spain

Abstract

Since the late 1970s and, above all, since 1990, a sizable contingent of Spanish economists coming back home after attending graduate school abroad, mostly in the U.S. and the UK, managed to introduce drastic changes in governance in a number of economics departments and research centers, including meritocratic hiring and promotion practices. These initiatives were also favored by the availability of resources to finance certain research needs, including the organization of international Ph.D. programs. Using a dataset of 3,540 economists working in 2007 in 125 academic centers in 22 countries, this paper presents some evidence on the role of this institutional revolution on the patterns of brain gain, brain drain, and net gain in Spain and other countries. Conditional on some personal, department, and country characteristics, the net effect of a given country is defined as the difference between the effect of working in 2007 in that country on the probability of brain gain and the effect of being born in that country on the probability of brain drain. The main result is that the net effect of Spain is greater than the net effect of comparable large, continental European countries, i.e. Germany, France, and Italy, where economists have similar opportunities for publishing their research in English, the lingua franca of science, or in their own languages. On the other hand, we define the average probability of net gain in any country as the difference between the average of the estimated individual probabilities of brain gain and brain drain in the country in question. We find that the average probability of net gain in Spain is only below that of the U.S., but it is greater than that of Germany, France or Italy.