When a scientist or inventor migrates, they take their knowledge with them. And in the right environment, that knowledge can act as the seed of something much larger than an individual can accomplish.
This is an audio read through of the (initial draft of the) article Importing Knowledge, published on New Things Under the Sun.
Articles Mentioned:
Moser, Petra, Alessandra Voena, and Fabian Waldinger. 2014. German Jewish Émigrés and US Invention. American Economic Review 104(10): 3222-55. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.104.10.3222
Ferrucci, Edoardo. 2020. Migration, innovation and technological diversion: German patenting after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Research Policy 49(9): 104057. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2020.104057
Choudhury, Prithwiraj, and Do Yoon Kim. 2018. The ethnic migrant inventor effect: Codification and recombination of knowledge across borders. Strategic Management Journal 40(2): 203-229. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2977
Bahar, Dany, Prithwiraj Choudhury, and Hillel Rapoport. 2020. Migrant inventors and the technological advantage of nations. Research Policy 49(9): 103947. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2020.103947
Bernstein, Shai, Rebecca Diamond, Timothy McQuade and Beatriz Pousada. 2019. The contribution of high-skilled immigrants to innovation in the United States. Working Paper.
Ganguli, Ina. 2015. Immigration and Ideas: What did Russian scientists “bring” to the United States? Journal of Labor Economics 33(S1P2). https://doi.org/10.1086/679741