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  • 2019
  • Working Paper
  • HBS Working Paper Series

Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury
  • Format:Print
  • | Language:English
  • | Pages:72
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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 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.

Keywords

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

Citation

Bahar, Dany, Prithwiraj Choudhury, and Hillel Rapoport. "Migrant Inventors and the Technological Advantage of Nations." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-119, May 2019.

About The Author

Prithwiraj Choudhury

Technology and Operations Management
→More Publications

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  • How “Digital Nomad” Visas Can Boost Local Economies By: Prithwiraj Choudhury
  • GitLab and the Future of All-Remote Work By: Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury
  • Is Hybrid Work the Best of Both Worlds? Evidence from a Field Experiment By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Christos A. Makridis and Kyle Schirmann
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