The Contribution of Foreign Master's Students to US Start-Ups

Michel Beine, Giovanni Peri and Morgan Raux

No 21356, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: This paper estimates the causal effect of international student enrollment in US Master's programs on start-up creation in the United States over the period 1999–2019. Using university-cohort data linked to administrative enrollment records and comprehensive start-up data, we exploit two complementary sources of plausibly exogenous variation in international enrollment: tuition changes and pre-2004 enrollment networks. We find that higher international enrollment significantly increases start-up formation within five years of graduation. A substantial share of this effect operates through spillovers to US-born graduates educated alongside international students. These indirect effects suggest that prior estimates understate the contribution of international students to entrepreneurial activity in the US.

JEL-codes: F22 I23 M13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21356 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21356

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21356

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().