Human capital depletion, human capital formation, and migration: a blessing or a “curse”?

We specify conditions under which a strictly positive probability of employment in a foreign country raises the level of human capital formed by optimizing workers in the home country. While some workers migrate, “taking along” more human capital than if they had migrated without factoring in the possibility of migration (a form of brain drain), other workers stay at home with more human capital than they would have formed in the absence of the possibility of migration (a form of brain gain).