The determinants of United Kingdom student visa demand from developing countries

IZA Journal of Labor & Development

Table 1 Determinants of UK student visa applications

Variables	(1)	(2)	(3)
Log of GDP per capita	0.7030	0.7810*	1.0033
	(0.4515)	(0.4446)	(0.6726)
Log of exchange rate	−0.7665**	−0.7516**	−1.4193***
	(0.3030)	(0.3053)	(0.4053)
Log of real visa cost	−0.2041	−0.0729	0.1180
	(0.3822)	(0.3481)	(0.3980)
Import share (%)	1.9717**	1.9109**	1.7573*
	(0.9944)	(0.9863)	(1.0147)
Export share (%)	−1.0324***	−1.1115***	−1.0807***
	(0.2496)	(0.2556)	(0.2624)
Post 7/7 Dummy		−0.1789**	−0.1179
	†	(0.0759)	(0.0824)
Lagged Refusal Rate (%)	†	†	−0.0072*
			(0.4138)
Country-specific fixed effects included	Yes	Yes	Yes
Country-specific time trends included	Yes	Yes	Yes
Number of observations	661	661	566
Number of Countries	89	89	89
Serial Correlation Test (F-test)	27.049***	27.044***	13.389***
	[0.000]	[0.000]	[0.000]
Heteroscedasticity Test (Chi-squared)	313.6***	315.3***	314.6***
	(0.000)	[0.000]	[0.000]
R-squared (within)	0.538	0.541	0.511

Notes:
(1) The estimation period is 2001 to 2008 (inclusive).
(2) The fixed effects estimator is used in estimation.
(3) The dependent variable is the log of student visa applications per 100,000 of the country of origin population (see Equation (1) in the text).
(4) ***, ** and * denote statistical significance at the 0.01, 0.05 and 0.10 level respectively using two-tailed tests.
(5) Clustered robust standard errors are reported in parentheses for regression model estimates and prob-values are reported within the squared brackets for the diagnostic tests. See text for a discussion of the serial correlation and heteroscedasticity tests.
(6) The regression model includes 89 country-specific time trends, which are not reported here to conserve space.
(7) † denotes not applicable in estimation.