November 2020
Article
Research Policy

Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations

By: Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Hillel Rapoport

Format:Print

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 percent 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.

Keywords

Innovation; Migration; Patent; Knowledge; Innovation and Invention; Immigration; Patents; Information Technology; Knowledge Dissemination

Citation

Bahar, Dany, Prithwiraj Choudhury, and Hillel Rapoport. "Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations." Special Issue on STEM Migration, Research, and Innovation. Research Policy 49, no. 9 (November 2020).