Talents and cultures: immigrant inventors and ethnic diversity in the age of mass migration

Francesco Campo, Mariapia Mendola, Andrea Morrison and Gianmarco Ottaviano

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We investigate the importance of co-ethnic networks and diversity in determining immigrant inventors' settlements in the United States by following the location choices of thousands of them across counties during the Age of Mass Migration. To do so, we combine a unique United States Patent and Trademark Office historical patent dataset on immigrants who arrived as adults with Census data and exploit exogenous variation in both immigration flows and diversity induced by former settlements, WWI, and the 1920s Immigration Acts. We find that co-ethnic networks play an important role in attracting immigrant inventors. Yet, we also find that immigrant diversity acts as an additional significant pull factor. This is mainly due to externalities that foster immigrant inventors' productivity.

JEL-codes: F22 J61 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2022-10-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro, nep-his, nep-ino, nep-int and nep-ure
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Published in Journal of the European Economic Association, 1, October, 2022, 20(5), pp. 1971 - 2012. ISSN: 1542-4766

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/124052/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Talents and Cultures: Immigrant Inventors and Ethnic Diversity in the Age of Mass Migration (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:124052

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