Immigration & Ideas: What Did Russian Scientists 'Bring' to the US?

Ina Ganguli

No 30, SITE Working Paper Series from Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics

Abstract: This paper examines how high-skilled immigrants contribute to knowledge diffusion using a rich dataset of Russian scientists and US citations to Soviet-era publications. Analysis of a panel of US cities and scientific fields shows that citations to Soviet-era work increased significantly with the arrival of immigrants. A difference-in-differences analysis with matched paper-pairs also shows that after Russian scientists moved to the US, citations to their Soviet-era papers increased relative to control papers. Both strategies reveal scientific field-specific effects. Ideas in high-impact papers and papers previously accessible to US scientists were the most likely to "spill over" to natives.

Keywords: high skill immigration; citations; innovation; Russia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J40 J61 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2014-11-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-his, nep-ino, nep-lma and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:hasite:0030

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