Human capital dynamics: the geographical mobility of high-school graduates towards university in Italy

The paper studies the geographical mobility of high-school graduates who change their residence to enrol in university in Italy, a country with deep geographical socioeconomic cleavages. While the previous literature has mostly focused on interregional mobility, we define mobility at the provincial level in order to observe both long- and short-distance movements. Our descriptive results show that students’ geographical mobility follows the distribution of universities, while only long-distance mobility follows the socioeconomic cleavages of the country. Our micro-level model shows a positive effect of students’ social class of origin, gender and previous school performance. These effects are stronger in the south, while the effect of social class is the same over geographical areas.