Does corruption influence university students’ mobility? Evidence from Italy

This paper investigates a little explored line of research on the relationship between corruption and university students’ mobility in Italy. Specifically, it highlights the push and pull role of corruption on university freshers’ mobility within Italian provinces. To this aim, the paper explores panel data on first-year undergraduate students aggregated at the Italian sub-regional level (NUTS-3: provinces) between 2010 and 2017. The study addresses three research questions: (i) whether high corruption at the origin incentivizes freshers to move and attend university elsewhere; (ii) whether low corruption at the destination attracts freshers to local university, and (iii) whether there is heterogeneity in the role played by corruption among freshers enrolled in different university fields of study. Overall, the empirical findings provide evidence of the dual “push-pull” effects of corruption on freshers’ mobility within Italian provinces. In addition, there is some heterogeneity in how corruption influences students’ decisions: the push effect is stronger for students in the Humanities and Social Sciences, while the pull effect is more pronounced for students in the Life Sciences. Based on the evidence that there is a significant relationship between corruption and freshers’ mobility, similar to other well-researched factors (i.e., income per capita, employment, quality of universities), policy remedies aimed at increasing transparency, merit, legacy, and institutional quality are suggested to mitigate the occurrence of these complex phenomena in Italy.