Hillel Rapoport

Together with Michel Beine and Docquier, Rapoport explores under which conditions brain drain could increase economic growth, arguing that a "beneficial brain drain" occurs when potential emigrants' additional investments into their education because of hopes for higher returns abroad - the "brain effect" - outweighs the "drain effect", i.e., the decrease in human capital due to actual emigration.[10] They find evidence for this effect in further research on skilled migration from developing countries, wherein those combining low levels of schooling with low emigration rates experience a beneficial brain drain.[11] In a more recent study with David McKenzie, Albert Bollard and Melanie Morten, Rapoport finds that more educated people tend to remit more, conditional on remitting at all.[12]

Another topic in Rapoport's research has been migration selectivity, which conceives of migration as a (self-)selective process. For instance, in work with Ravi Kanbur, Rapoport has developed a model with selectivity by education, wherein human capital may develop either way depending on the endo- or exogeneity of education and where past migration increase the incentives for prospective migrants to emigrate, thereby helping the model to explain the evolution of spatial inequalities in the face of ongoing migration from poor to rich areas.[13] These network effects are further explored in work with McKenzie in Mexico, where they are found to decrease the costs for future migrants and overall reduce inequality across communities with high levels of past migration.[14] Moreover, Rapoport and McKenzie also find evidence suggesting that the presence of migrant networks drives self-selection, with Mexican communities with strong migrant networks "sending" typically less educated members to the US compared with communities with weaker networks, in line with Borjas (1987) and Chiquiar and Hanson (2005).[15]

• In an analysis of the relationship between birthplace diversity and economic prosperity with Alberto Alesina and Johann Harnoss, Rapoport finds that birthplace diversity is unassociated with ethnic, linguistic or genetic diversity and that the diversity of immigrants is correlated with economic prosperity, especially for skilled, culturally proximate immigrants, suggesting complementarities between the skills of immigrants and natives.[16]
• Investigating with Maurice Kugler whether international labor and capital flows are complements or substitutes, Rapoport argues that foreign direct investment and migration substitute each other at the global level, while highlighting that migrants provide information about future investment opportunities in their countries of origin.[17]