using the Political Rights indicator and Economic Freedom. The share of tertiary educated workers over the total residence labor force is not signi...cant anymore, probably due to the two variables being highly correlated (0.7145). Finally, the coe¢ cient on the GDP per capita is in general positive but not always signi...cant.<sup>20</sup> The estimations con...rm that democracy is very persistent. Moreover, considering the ...rst 3 columns in each table, the coe¢ cient on past democracy ranges between the estimated coe¢ cient in pooled OLS, which is usually biased upwards, and the estimated coe¢ cient for the ...xed e¤ect, which usually displays a downward bias.

The AR(2) test which tests the null hypothesis that the error term is not second order serially correlated, and the Hansen J test of overindentifying restrictions, indicate that the moment conditions are satis...ed and the instruments are valid.

In general, the results appear quite robust across speci...cations and indices.<sup>21</sup> To evaluate whether the skill composition of migration, and not just its size, a¤ects institutional quality at home, we introduce in column 6 the share of tertiary educated amongs migrants. The coe¢ cient of the share of tertiary educated migrants is negative but not statistically signi...cant for 3 indicators out of 4 and is only positive and signi...cant at the 10 percent when considering the EFW indicator. In spite or, rather, because of this inconclusive result, we will further investigate this issue in the next section using numerical simulations.

Finally, one may be concerned, as Acemoglu et al. (2005) were about their own study, that the presence of socialist countries in our sample may largely a¤ect the estimation results. Indeed, most socialist countries had high levels of education in the 1980s and did not experience any particularly increase in educational attainments during or immediately after the transition. In addition, prior to the transition, legal emigration was strongly restricted, while after the transition most socialist countries

> 20In unreported regressions, we also introduce as control variables, the mediam age of the population, and urbanization rate. While human capital loses its signi...cance, probably because of multicollinearity, the total emigration rate remains signi...cant when considering these additional control variables as exogenous. If they are considered as pre-determined, then the emigration rate also loses its signi...cance too, which may be due either to collinearity or instruments proliferation.

21To further assess the robustness of our results, in unreported regressions we considered the total emigration rate divided by a coverage measure in the Defoort (2008) dataset. Recall that the Defoort ...gures are based on the six major destination countries (USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, UK and France). Comparing the emigration stocks in 2000 in the Defoort data set with those in the Docquier and Marfouk (2006) data set (which is based to 30 OECD destination countries) yields a variable indicating the percentage of coverage of the Defoort data set. Dividing the total emigration rate by this coverage measure does not a¤ect the quality of the results.

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