The determinants of International Mobility of Students

This paper analyzes the determinants of the choice of location of international students.
Building on the documented trends in international migration of students, we identify the
various factors associated to the attraction of migrants as well as the costs of moving abroad.
Using new data capturing the number of students from a large set of origin countries
studying in a set of 13 OECD countries, we assess the importance of the various factors
identified in the theory. We find support for a significant network effect in the migration of
students, a result so far undocumented in the literature. We also find a significant role for cost
factors such as housing prices and for attractiveness variables such as the reported quality of
universities. In contrast, we do not find an important role for registration fees.