Wednesday, February 25, 2026 11:00 - 12:00

SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH

About this event

Countries compete for high-skilled migrants through increasingly differentiated visa policies, yet the effect of these policies on the global allocation of talent remains poorly understood. We construct a Global Visa Atlas documenting over 2,500 visa pathways across 134 countries ? detailing eligibility requirements, costs, and rights ? and link it to quarterly bilateral migration flows of college-educated workers covering 180 countries. Exploiting staggered visa reforms within a structural gravity framework, we estimate the causal effect of visa barriers on skilled worker flows. A discrete choice model incorporating eligibility-driven choice-set heterogeneity recovers heterogeneous migration elasticities and enables counterfactual analysis of alternative policy designs, including the welfare consequences of cross-destination competition for talent.

Participants are expected to adhere to the CEP Events Code of Conduct.

Directions

This event will take place in SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH.

The building is labelled SAL on the LSE campus map. You can also find us on Google Maps. For further information, go to contact us.

International Economics Workshops are part of the CEP's Trade programme.