Research notes · Knowledge

Can a migrant community move an entire industry's technology across an ocean?

What the authors found

Boberg-Fazlić and Sharp study nineteenth-century Danish-American settlements and the US dairy industry. Denmark had developed distinctive dairy techniques, and the authors find that American counties with existing Danish communities adopted them and developed dairying more intensively. The mechanism is not trade or licensing but people: knowledge travelled with settlers and stayed embedded in the places they settled.

What our data adds

The kind of transfer this paper describes leaves no trace in any of the knowledge indicators this database holds. There is no payment, so nothing appears in the intellectual property lines; no patent, so nothing in the filing counts; no article, so nothing in the publication series. What would show is migrant stock — the United States holds 52.4 million foreign-born residents — and a stock figure says nothing about what any of them knew. The most consequential knowledge flows may be precisely the ones that generate no transaction to record.

What this cannot show

This note is about a blind spot rather than a finding. Every knowledge indicator in this platform is a count of something formal: a filing, a payment, a publication. Tacit knowledge moving inside a community is invisible to all of them by construction, and the historical parish and census records the authors assembled are not a shape this data model holds. Nothing here could confirm or challenge the result.

The data behind it

Related notes

• When cheap imports arrive, do domestic firms innovate their way out or give up?
• Rich countries spend more on research every year. Why is measured productivity growth falling?
• How much of what gets patented rests on publicly funded science?

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