The Elite Brain Drain

By Rachel Hunter, Andrew J. Oswald, Bruce G. Charlton. Social Science Research Network, 2009

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We collect data on the movement and productivity of elite scientists. Their mobility is remarkable: nearly half of the world’s most-cited physicists work outside their country of birth. We show they migrate systematically towards nations with large R&D spending. Our study cannot adjudicate on whether migration improves scientists’ productivity, but we find that movers and stayers have identical h-index citations scores. Immigrants in the UK and US now win Nobel Prizes proportionately less often than earlier. US residents’ h-indexes are relatively high. We describe a framework where a key role is played by low mobility costs in the modern world.

Subfields: Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8651f9a40d534019d42a61055f3d976b948eb84

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In Statistics and Probability

Citations in the corpus

International Scientist Mobility and the Locus of Knowledge and Technology Transfer (2011, background): “In the 1990s, the economic consequences of scientist and highly skilled worker mobility came back on the agenda of OECD countries (Salt, 1997; OECD, 2002; Schiff, 2005; Hunter et al., 2009).”
The Economic Consequences of 'Brain Drain' of the Best and Brightest: Microeconomic Evidence from Five Countries (2010, unknown): “For example, Hunter et al. (2009) consider Nobel Prize winners and highly-cited scientists, Ben-David (2007) Israeli economists, Clemens and Pettersson (2008) African health professionals, Commander et al. (2004) doctors in the United Kingdom, and Constant and D‟Agosto (2008) Italian researchers…”
Scientific Mobility and Knowledge Transfer at the Interregional and Intraregional Level (2013, background): “However, empirical evidence about the international mobility of elite researchers is scarce (LAUDEL, 2005; HUNTER et al., 2009) and little is still known about the nature of knowledge flows and the regional consequences which result from the geographical mobility of outstanding researchers.”
Economic Impacts of Immigration: A Survey (2011, background): “The Hunter et al. (2009) study of the migration of prominent physicists is an important step in this direction.”
The mover’s advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists (2014, background): “In contrast, Hunter et al. (2009) find that UK highly-cited physicists who migrated to the US perform similarly to domestic-US physicists; their performance is also no different from that of those who stayed.”
Millionaire Migration and Taxation of the Elite (2016, background): “Among the world’s top physicists, however, only about 50 percent live in their country of birth, indicating high mobility among top academics and a problem of brain drain facing many small countries (Hunter, Oswald, and Charlton 2009; Zucker and Darby 2007).”