UROP Project

Economic development and migration

In the field of development economics, the relationship between economic development and migration has been a highly studied issue. This area of research allows to investigate the impact of international migration on macro or micro level. Fields of interest include brain drain, human capital formation in receiving or sending country, impact on local labor markets and determinants of migration. The available data allows to conduct a global, a regional or a country study.

Task

The first part of the project consists of gaining an overview of the field by sighting the relvant literature and defining a research question jointly with the supervisor, which fits the research interns interests. Based on the prelimary findings from the litearure review, hypotheses are derived and are eventually emprically tested. The empirical part involves the collection of publicly available data and its statistical and/or econometrical analysis. The final step consists of interpreting, discussing and visualizing the results as well as preparing the research poster for the symposium.

Requirements

You should be interested in current topics of development economics, in particular human capital formation, economics of migration and/or political economy. In addition, a basic understanding of economic principles and statistic and/or econometrics is required. As part of the project deeper knowledge in the relevant field can be acquired. Further, interest in learning new software (e.g. STATA,R) and willingness to improve analytical skills as well as motivation to develop own ideas are very helpful.