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A large literature has documented the incentive e˙ect of emigration prospects in terms of human capital accumulation in origin countries. Much less attention has been paid to the impact on speci˝c educational choices. We provide some evidence from the behaviour of students of the University of Lorraine located in the North-East of France and close to Luxembourg, a booming economy with attractive work conditions. We ˝nd that students who paid attention to the foreign labour market at the time of enrolment tend to choose topics that lead to occupations that are highly valued in Luxembourg. These results hold when accounting for heterogeneous substitution patterns across study ˝elds through the estimation of advanced discrete choice models. Incentive e˙ects of emigra-tion prospects are also found when accounting for the potential endogeneity of the interest for the foreign labour market using a control function approach based on the initial locations of these students at the time of enrolment. Con-sistently, students showing no attention to the foreign labour market are not subject to the incentive e˙ect of emigration prospects.
