Intellectual Baggage of Ethnic Migrant Inventors: Transfer and Recombination of Knowledge Across Borders

Prithwiraj  Choudhury

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2018

Intellectual Baggage of Ethnic Migrant Inventors: Transfer and Recombination of Knowledge Across Borders

Abstract

Ethnic migrant inventors might differ from locals in terms of knowledge they bring to host firms. We study the role of first-generation ethnic migrant inventors in cross-border transfer of knowledge previously locked within the cultural context of their home regions. Using a unique dataset of Chinese and Indian herbal patents filed in the United States, we find that an increase in the supply of first-generation ethnic migrant inventors increases the rate of codification of herbal knowledge at U.S. assignees. Our identification comes from an exogenous shock to the quota of H1B visas and from a list of entities exempted from the shock. We also find that ethnic migrant inventors are more likely to engage in reuse of their prior knowledge, whereas inventors from other ethnic backgrounds are more likely to engage in knowledge recombination.

Keywords: skilled migration; ethnic migration; first-generation migrant; cultural context; knowledge flows; knowledge reuse; knowledge recombination; recombinant creation; H1B visas; Knowledge Sharing; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Knowledge Dissemination; Immigration; Ethnicity;

Language: English

Format: Print

47 pages

Citation:

Choudhury, Prithwiraj. "Intellectual Baggage of Ethnic Migrant Inventors: Transfer and Recombination of Knowledge Across Borders." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 17-069, January 2017. (Revised January 2018.)

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 50% 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 with 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 that translate into higher patenting. We complement our results with micro-evidence showing that migrant inventors are more prevalent in the first bulk of patents of a country in a given technology, as compared to patents filed at later stages. We interpret these results as tangible evidence of migrants facilitating the technology-specific diffusion of knowledge across nations.

Ethnic migrant inventors may differ from locals in terms of the knowledge they bring to host firms. We study the role of first-generation ethnic migrant inventors in cross-border transfer of knowledge previously locked within the cultural context of their home regions. Using a unique dataset of Chinese and Indian herbal patents filed in the United States, we find that an increase in the supply of first-generation ethnic migrant inventors increases the rate of codification of herbal knowledge at U.S. assignees by 4.5%. Our identification comes from an exogenous shock to the quota of H1B visas and from a list of entities exempted from the shock. We also find that ethnic migrant inventors are more likely to engage in reuse of their prior knowledge, whereas knowledge recombination is more likely to be pursued by teams comprising inventors from other ethnic backgrounds.

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Intellectual Baggage of Ethnic Migrant Inventors: Transfer and Recombination of Knowledge Across Borders

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