%0 Report
        %A Patt, Alexander
%A Ruhose, Jens
%A Wiederhold, Simon
%A Flores, Miguel
        %T International Emigrant Selection on Occupational Skills
        %D 2017
        %8 2017 Jun
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 10837
        %U https://www.iza.org/publications/dp10837
        %X We present the first evidence that international emigrant selection on education and earnings materializes through occupational skills. Combining novel data from a representative Mexican task survey with rich individual-level worker data, we find that Mexican migrants to the United States have higher manual skills and lower cognitive skills than non-migrants. 
Conditional on occupational skills, education and earnings no longer predict migration decisions. Differential labor-market returns to occupational skills explain the observed selection pattern and significantly outperform previously used returns-to-skills measures in predicting migration. Results are persistent over time and hold within narrowly defined regional, sectoral, and occupational labor markets. 
        %K selection
%K international migration
%K skills
%K occupations