Emigrant Selection and Wages: the Case of Poland

In this paper, I use a unique individual-level pre-migration labour market dataset for Poland to examine emigrant selection in two major destination countries, the United Kingdom and Germany. I compare the pre-migration observable and unobservable characteristics of emigrants with those of non-emigrants in Poland. First, I find that Polish emigrants to the UK are more similarly educated to non-emigrants while being more negatively selected on residual wages. Second, emigrants to Germany are disproportionately more likely to fall in the middle of the education distribution but they are no different than non-emigrants in terms of unobservable skills. The familiar predictions of the Borjas (1987) model allow me to partially undercover the mechanism driving the selection patterns of Polish emigrants. I contribute to the migrant selection literature by providing additional evidence on how migrants respond to differences in both labour markets and migration policies across countries.