Emigrants with higher human capital

The nature of and possible consequence of emigrant self-selection has long been a topic of interest.  The general idea is that groups of people electing to move from one location another might have materially different characteristics (religious, biological, social, economic, etc.) than the population who remain behind.  This has the implication that the move to a new location may be (through the consequences of self-selection), as important as the conditions into which they relocated.  

For example, the Puritan migration to North America in the 1630s was clearly self-selected, of course based on religion, but also other attributes.  The departing Puritans were richer and more educated than the remaining English.

It is an interesting and controversial field, the study of emiigrant self-selection.  

There is a new paper,  Numeracy selectivity of Spanish migrants in colonial America (sixteenth–eighteenth centuries) by María del Carmen Pérez-Artés.  From the Abstract:

Since the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the so-called New World in 1492, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards settled in Central and South America. This paper assesses the skill selectivity of Spanish migrants who went to Hispanic America during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries for the first time. The age-heaping method is employed to estimate numeracy levels as a proxy for human capital. With a database of 33 929 individual observations, the findings show that Spaniards who left the country to settle in the Spanish territories were positively self-selected. Additionally, differences are observed in the human capital of those who chose to settle in Mexico, who had a higher level of numeracy, than those who chose Peru. These differences might be due to the viceroyalty structure and educational institutions that encouraged the emigration of people with greater human capital to Mexico. Finally, when the level of numeracy of Spaniards in Hispanic America is compared with the numeracy of the total population, emigrants still had higher levels of human capital.