Skilled Immigration and Innovation: Evidence from Enrolment Fluctuations in us Doctoral Programmes

By Eric T. Stuen, A. M. Mobarak, Keith E. Maskus. 2012

164 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the contribution of foreign science and engineering talent to the creation of new knowledge in the U.S. economy using panel data on 2300 science and engineering (S&E) departments at 100 large American universities from 1973 to 1998. We use macroeconomic shocks and policy changes in source countries that differentially affect enrollments across fields and universities to isolate exogenous variation in the supply of students at specific departments. Both foreign and domestic graduate students are central inputs into knowledge creation, and the marginal foreign student contributes more to the production of scientific publications and citations. A 10% decrease in the foreign share of doctoral students lowers S&E research output at U.S. universities by 5-6%. A theoretical model of university admissions and scholarships helps us infer the productivity effects of student quality, and econometric results indicate that any visa restrictions limiting entry of high-quality foreign students is most costly for U.S. innovation. Increased diversity appears to be the primary mechanism by which foreign students improve research outcomes. The impact of more restrictive immigration policies depends on how they affect the quality margin and diversity of incoming foreigners.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/516591848b4814384ef754f6a95fb4e8ea69e3d5

Citations in the corpus

• Global Talent Flows (2016, unknown): “10 For example, see Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle (2010); Kerr and Lincoln (2010); Stuen, Mobarak, and Maskus (2012); Moser, Voena, and Waldinger (2014); Kerr, Kerr, and Lincoln (2015b); Peri, Shih, and Sparber (2015); and Ghosh, Mayda, and Ortega (2014).”
• High-Skilled Migration and Agglomeration (2017, unknown): “24 For example, Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle (2010), Kerr and Lincoln (2010), Lofstrom and Hayes (2011), Stuen et al. (2012), Moser et al. (2014), Kerr et al. (2015b), Peri et al. (2015), and Ghosh et al. (2016).”
• Same difference? Minority ethnic inventors, diversity and innovation in the UK (2015, unknown): “Since the 1980s minority communities, particularly those of South/East Asian origin, have played increasingly important roles in US science and technology sectors (Stephan and Levin, 2001; Chellaraj et al., 2008; Stuen et al., 2012).”
• The mover’s advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists (2014, unknown): “Stuen et al. (2012) show that the supply of foreign students increases the productivity of related departments, but find that the marginal impact of foreign and domestic students is not statistically different in magnitude.”
• International business travel: an engine of innovation? (2014, unknown): “While international migration has long been a hot topic in debates on labor market policies, some recent work has started to address another set of policy questions by linking long-term immigration to innovation in an economy (Peri 2007; Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle 2010; Stuen et al. 2012).”
• Understanding the Changing Structure of Scientific Inquiry (2016, unknown): “Other recent papers that use this empirical strategy include Waldinger (2010, 2012), Fons-Rosen (2012); Stuen, Mobarak, and Maskus (2012); Jones and Olken (2005); and Acemoglu, Hassan, and Robinson (2011).”
• The impact of cultural diversity on firm innovation: evidence from Dutch micro-data (2013, unknown): “Thus, one branch of this literature analyses the impact of foreign entrepreneurs, students and inventors on innovation (Stuen et al. 2012; Kerr, 2010; Kerr and Lincoln, 2010; Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle, 2008; Lobo and Strumsky, 2008; Zucker and Darby, 2007; and Faggian and McCann, 2006).”