Migration and invention in the age of mass migration

Dario Diodato, Andrea Morrison and Sergio Petralia

No 1835, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: More than 30 million people migrated to the US between the 1850s and 1920s and in order of thousands became inventors and patentees. Drawing on a novel dataset of immigrant inventors in the US, we assess the city-level impact of immigrants' patenting and their contribution to the technological specialization of the receiving US regions between 1870 and 1940. Our results show that native inventors benefited from the inventive activity of immigrants. We find that immigrant inventors imported knowledge from their home country, which generated positive local spill-overs. In addition, we show that the knowledge transferred by immigrants gave rise to new and previously not exiting technological fields in the US regions where immigrants moved to. Our findings are robust to several checks and the implementation of an instrumental variable strategy.

Keywords: immigration; innovation; knowledge spill-over; patent; age of mass migration; US (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J61 O31 R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-10, Revised 2018-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-his, nep-ino, nep-int, nep-ipr, nep-lab, nep-mig, nep-sbm, nep-tid and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg1835.pdf Version October 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Migration and invention in the Age of Mass Migration (2022)
Working Paper: Migration and invention in the Age of Mass Migration (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:egu:wpaper:1835

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