The impact of Brexit on international students' return intentions

Abstract

This paper is the first attempt to study the causal impact of the UK’s departure from the European Union (EU), on the post-graduation mobility decisions of EU students in the UK. We exploit the British government’s formal withdrawal notification under Article 50 as a natural experiment and employ a difference-in-differences design. Using data from a new survey of graduating international students, we find that immediately after the announcement of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU EU graduating students are significantly more likely than non-EU graduating students to plan to leaving the UK upon graduation. Interestingly, students from the new EU countries and students from the EU14 countries who are undecided of their migration plans drive these results. We further show that the deterrent effects are heterogeneous and depend on age and subject among others. These findings carry important implications for post-Brexit UK and for other European countries with emerging calls for their own referendums.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Jane Falkingham: orcid.org/0000-0002-7135-5875

ORCID for Corrado Giulietti: orcid.org/0000-0003-2986-4438

ORCID for Jackline Wahba: orcid.org/0000-0002-0002-3443

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