Exploring mobility of Italian Ph.Ds over the last decades

Migration is a permanent phenomenon rooted in history and it involves high-skilled workers (HSWs), high-educated workers (HEWs) and students. Among them, a crucial role is played by PhDs. Both HSWs and HEWs face the risk of not finding a job matching their skills and they can opt to accept a job for which they are overeducated or move to another country or region. The mobility of HSWs can be interpreted as a positive issue that can help to match jobs and skills. However, the emergence of a clear path between areas of countries or regions (e.g., from Southern to Northern Italy) highlights the risks of a drain of human capital from areas with low development to more developed ones. In this paper, we focus on a category of HSWs who have been almost neglected by the literature, PhDs. The aim of this study was to shed light on the mobility pattern of Italian PhDs. This aim was pursued by using microdata from the 2014 ISTAT Survey on the professional conditions of Italian PhDs four and six years after the end of their studies. This work highlights that southern PhDs had a higher probability of moving to another area of the country, while northern PhDs seemed to prefer to move abroad, thus confirming a previous study which identified a similar pattern for graduates. While the northern part of the country compensates for the drain of human capital with the mobility from the other part of Italy, the southern part faces a relevant drain of 'talents'.