Migration and invention in the Age of Mass Migration

Immigration in American economic history

Dario Diodato, Andrea Morrison and Sergio Petralia

Journal of Economic Geography, 2022, vol. 22, issue 2, 477-498

Abstract: More than 30 million people migrated to the USA between late-ninetieth and early-twentieth century, and thousands became inventors. Drawing on a novel dataset of immigrant inventors in the USA, 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. 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.

Keywords: Immigration; innovation; knowledge spill-over; patent; Age of Mass Migration; USA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J61 O31 R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Migration and invention in the Age of Mass Migration (2022)
Working Paper: Migration and invention in the age of mass migration (2018)
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