Knowledge Remittances: Does Emigration Foster Innovation?

Thomas Fackler, Yvonne Giesing and Nadzeya Laurentsyeva ()

No 7420, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Does the emigration of skilled individuals necessarily result in losses for source countries due to the brain drain? Combining industry-level patenting and migration data from 32 European countries, we show that emigration in fact positively contributes to innovation in source countries. We use changes in the labour mobility legislation within Europe as exogenous variation to establish causality. By analysing patent citation data, we further provide evidence that these positive effects are driven by knowledge flows that are triggered by emigrants. While skilled migrants are not inventing in their home country anymore, they contribute to cross-border knowledge and technology diffusion and thus help less advanced countries to catch up to the technology frontier.

Keywords: migration; innovation; knowledge spillovers; patent citations; EU enlargement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J61 O31 O33 O52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-eur, nep-ino, nep-int, nep-ipr, nep-knm, nep-lab, nep-mig, nep-sbm, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Knowledge remittances: Does emigration foster innovation? (2020)
Working Paper: Knowledge remittances: Does emigration foster innovation? (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7420

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