How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation?

By Jennifer Hunt, Marjolaine Gauthier-Loiselle. Social Science Research Network, 2009

1,072 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We measure the extent to which skilled immigrants increase innovation in the United States by exploring individual patenting behavior as well as state-level determinants of patenting. The 2003 National Survey of College Graduates shows that immigrants patent at double the native rate, and that this is entirely accounted for by their disproportionately holding degrees in science and engineering. These data imply that a one percentage point rise in the share of immigrant college graduates in the population increases patents per capita by 6%. This could be an overestimate of immigration's benefit if immigrant inventors crowd out native inventors, or an underestimate if immigrants have positive spill-overs on inventors. Using a 1940-2000 state panel, we show that immigrants do have positive spill-overs, resulting in an increase in patents per capita of 9-18% in response to a one percentage point increase in immigrant college graduates. We isolate the causal effect by instrumenting the change in the share of skilled immigrants in a state with the state's predicted increase in the share of skilled immigrants. We base the latter on the 1940 distribution across states of immigrants from various source regions and the subsequent national increase in skilled immigrants from these regions.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/59a1ad3e89908f4cc32b9699c93e46622b897a52

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Immigration and Entrepreneurship (2015, methodology): “…immigrants are greatly over-represented among US-based Nobel Prize winners (Peri, 2007), high-impact companies (Hart and Acs, 2011), patent applications (Wadhwa et al., 2007), and members of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering (Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle, 2010).”
A toolkit of policies to promote innovation (2019, methodology): “4 Bernstein et al. (2018) use the death of an inventor as an exogenous shock to team productivity and argue for large spillover effects of immigrants on native innovation (Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle, 2010, also estimate large spillovers).”
Economic Impacts of Immigration: A Survey (2011, background): “Several studies further connect high-skill immigration to growth in innovation by city or state.21 The available evidence suggests that this is mainly due to high-skill immigrants being more involved in SE (e.g., Hunt 2010), with limited evidence of crowding-out of natives.”
Immigration and Innovation in European Regions (2011, background): “Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle (2008) find that highly-skilled immigrants boost patenting at the state-level in the US without crowding out native patenting.”
Highly-educated immigrants and native occupational choice (2011, neutral): “Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle (2008) similarly argue that highly-educated immigrants contribute proportionally more than natives to patented innovations due to their larger specialization in science and engineering occupations.”
The mover’s advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists (2014, background): “E-mail address: chiara.franzoni@polimi.it (C. Franzoni). da the evidence of positive differentials seems to be largely attributable to migrant preferences for training in technical and scientific subjects (Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle, 2010; Hunt, 2011).”