publications

ABSTRACT

How do regions enter new and distant technological fields? Who is triggering this process? This work addresses these compelling research questions by investigating the role of migrant inventors in the process of technological diversification. Immigrant inventors can indeed act as carriers of knowledge across borders and influence the direction of technological change. We test these latter propositions by using an original dataset of immigrant inventors in the context of European regions during the period 2003–201. Our findings show that: immigrant inventors generate positive local knowledge spillovers; they help their host regions to develop new technological specialisations; they trigger a process of unrelated diversification. Their contribution comes via two main mechanisms: immigrant inventors use their own personal knowledge (knowledge creation); they import knowledge from their home country to the host region (knowledge transfer). Their impact is maximised when their knowledge is not recombined with the local one (in mixed teams of inventors), but it is reused (in teams made by only migrant inventors). Our work contributes to the existing literature of regional diversification by providing fresh evidence of unrelated diversification for European regions and by identifying important agents of structural change. It also contributes to the literature of migration and innovation by adding fresh evidence on European regions and by unveiling some of the mechanisms of immigrants’ knowledge transmission.

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ABSTRACT

This study investigates whether high-skilled migration in a sample of OECD countries fosters technological diversification in the migrants’ countries of origin. We focus on migrant inventors and study their role as vectors of knowledge remittances. Further, we particularly analyze whether migrants spark related or unrelated diversification back home. To account for the uneven distribution of knowledge and migrants within the host countries, we break down the analysis at the metropolitan area level. Our results suggest that migrant inventors have a positive effect on the home countries’ technological diversification, particularly for developing countries and technologies with less related activities around—thus fostering unrelated diversification.

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ABSTRACT

This paper documents the influence of networks of highly skilled migrants on the international diffusion of knowledge – particularly those with degrees and occupations in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It investigates knowledge inflows to host countries brought in by skilled immigrants. It then explores knowledge feedback to home countries generated by these migrants. We test our hypotheses in a country-pair gravity model setting, for the period 1990–2010, using patent citations across countries to measure international knowledge diffusion. Our results confirm our hypotheses on the positive impact of skilled migrants on knowledge flows to host and home countries. However, the former are not robust to instrumental variables and country-pair fixed-effects, and only matter in certain contexts: when the sending countries are developing nations and for knowledge diffusion within the boundaries of multinationals.

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ABSTRACT

This study explores the importance of the mobility of knowledge workers (i.e., inventors) for the formation of collaborative patents across different regional contexts. In particular, it looks at a sample of co-inventors in the biotechnology industry in Europe, and estimates the factors that speed up the years needed for collaboration. It tests and finds that collaborations between two separated inventors emerge faster if they were located in the same geographical area in the past, even after controlling for a large number of meaningful proximities between them. Furthermore, the empirical approach suggests that this ‘previous co-location’ premium becomes more valuable when other channels of interaction – social, cognitive, institutional, geographic – are weak or non-existent, and in fostering international technological collaborations.

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ABSTRACT

Based on a relational view of international business, we investigate the role of migrant inventors in cross-border mergers and acquisitions undertaken by R&D-active firms. We hypothesize that the migrant inventors’ international social networks can be leveraged by their employers in order to identify and/or integrate relevant knowledge bases of acquisition targets in the inventors’ home country. We nuance our hypothesis by means of several conditional logistic regressions on a large matched sample of deals and control cases. The impact of migrant inventors increases with the distance between countries and for targets located in countries with weak administrative/legal systems, as well as when targets are either innovative or belong to high-tech sectors or to the same sector as the acquirer, and for full versus partial acquisitions.

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ABSTRACT

Based on an original dataset linking patent data and biographical information for a large sample of US immigrant inventors with Indian names and surnames, specialized in ICT technologies, we investigate the rate and determinants of return migration. For each individual in the dataset, we both estimate the year of entry in the United States, the likely entry channel (work or education), and the permanence spell up to either the return to India or right truncation. By means of survival analysis, we then provide exploratory estimates of the probability of return migration as a function of the conditions at migration (age, education, patenting record, migration motives, and migration cohort) as well as of some activities undertaken while abroad (education and patenting). We find both evidence of negative self-selection with respect to educational achievements in the US and of positive self-selection with respect to patenting propensity. Based on the analysis of time-dependence of the return hazard ratios, return work migrants appear to be negatively self-selected with respect to unobservable skills acquired abroad, while evidence for education migrants is less conclusive.

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ABSTRACT

This paper documents the influence of diaspora networks of highly-skilled individuals—that is, inventors—on international technological collaborations. Using gravity models, it studies the determinants of the internationalization of inventive activity between a group of industrialized countries and a sample of developing and emerging economies. The paper examines the influence exerted by skilled diasporas in fostering cross-country co-inventorship as well as R&D offshoring. The study finds a strong and robust relationship between inventor diasporas and different forms of international co-patenting. However, the effect decreases with the level of formality of the interactions. Interestingly, some of the most successful diasporas recently documented—namely, Chinese and Indian ones—do not govern the results.

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ABSTRACT

We assess the role of ethnic ties in the diffusion of technical knowledge using a database of patents filed by US-resident inventors of foreign origin, identified by name analysis. We consider 10 leading source countries, both Asian and European, of highly skilled migration to the USA and test whether foreign inventors’ patents are disproportionately cited by (i) co-ethnic migrants (‘diaspora’ effect), and (ii) inventors residing in their country of origin (‘brain gain’ effect). We find evidence of the diaspora effect for the Asian but not the European countries, with the exception of Russia. A diaspora effect does not necessarily translate into a brain gain effect, most notably for India where no such effect is detected. Neither does a brain gain effect occur solely in conjunction with a diaspora effect. Overall, diaspora and brain gain effects carry less weight than other channels of knowledge transmission, most notably co-invention networks and multinational companies.

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