Migrant inventors and the technological advantage of nations

Dany Bahar; Prithwiraj Choudhury; Hillel Rapoport

doi:10.1016/j.respol.2020.103947

Migrant inventors and the technological advantage of nations

Dany Bahar
, Prithwiraj Choudhury
, Hillel Rapoport

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

68 Scopus citations

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between the presence of migrant inventors and the dynamics of innovation in the migrants’ receiving countries. We find that countries are 25 to 60% more likely to gain advantage in patenting in certain technologies given a twofold increase in the number of foreign inventors from other nations that specialize in those same technologies. For the average country in our sample, this number corresponds to only 25 inventors and a standard deviation of 135. We deal with endogeneity concerns by using historical migration networks to instrument for stocks of migrant inventors. Our results generalize the evidence of previous studies that show how migrant inventors “import” knowledge from their home countries, which translates into higher patenting in the receiving countries. We interpret these results as tangible evidence of migrants facilitating the technology-specific diffusion of knowledge across nations.

Original language	English
Article number	103947
Journal	Research Policy
Volume	49
Issue number	9
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2020.103947
State	Published - Nov 2020
Externally published	Yes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier B.V.

Funding

The authors are thankful to Ina Ganguli, Francesco Lissoni, Ernest Miguelez, and James Sappenfield, as well as participants at the Wharton Conference on Migration, Organizations, and Management (2019) for insightful comments. We also thank four anonymous referees for comments and suggestions. Bahar acknowledges financial support for this research provided by CAF-Development Bank of Latin America to the Brookings Institution. All errors are our own.

Funders
CAF-Development Bank of Latin America
James Sappenfield

Keywords

Innovation
Knowledge
Migration
Patent
Technology

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10.1016/j.respol.2020.103947

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Migrant inventors and the technological advantage of nations

Abstract

Bibliographical note

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Keywords

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