ABSTRACT
Increasingly, the international migration of skilled workers has the attention of regional and national policy makers, as well as academics, because of the widely assumed positive contribution of human capital to economic development. Since a transfer of human capital generally implies the movement of people (Fratesi 2014), efforts to attract human capital are more complex than efforts to attract, for example, economic capital, and generally involve individual choices and preferences. Individuals’ location choices often result from a combination of strategic factors – e.g., near to work or personal networks – and personal preferences. Higher education institutions play a very important role in influencing migration of the highly skilled: besides generating new human capital, universities attract talents from outside (Faggian and McCann 2006). Also, availability of jobs is an important attracting factor for higher-educated workers, and some regions are better at generating high-level jobs than others (Fratesi 2014). Further, especially for location choices within the region and for retaining knowledge workers, the housing stock and ‘soft conditions’ such as cultural and recreational amenities may also have some influence.
