Research notes · Knowledge

Does the arrival of migrants make the places they settle more inventive?

What the authors found

Burchardi, Chaney, Hassan, Tarquinio and Terry build an identification strategy from the interaction between quasi-random variation in the ancestry composition of US counties and contemporaneous inflows from those same origin countries — so the shock to a county is driven by who happened to settle there generations earlier. They find a positive causal effect of immigration on local innovation and growth.

What our data adds

Across countries the same relationship is invisible, and the contrast is the point. Israel leads the world on research intensity at 6.35 per cent of GDP without a foreign-born share near the top of the table, while the United Arab Emirates at 74.0 per cent foreign-born and Singapore at 48.7 do not lead on patenting per head. Switzerland at 31.1 per cent foreign-born and 3.22 per cent research spending fits the story; Australia at 30.4 per cent foreign-born does not. A cross-country scatter of these two variables would show essentially nothing.

What this cannot show

That nothing is a fact about aggregation, not about immigration. The paper's effect is local, identified within one country from historical settlement patterns, and comparing national averages across countries with different industrial structures, education systems and migration policies discards every source of variation the design depends on. A reader should not take the flat cross-country picture as evidence against the result — this note exists to explain why the two do not speak to each other.

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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