Global talent fosters innovation and collaborative patents

Innovation thrives when a diverse set of ideas come together, and globalisation plays an important role in facilitating this process. This recombination often happens through skilled people moving to top talent clusters or labs. Over 40 per cent of the researchers at America’s top seven cancer research centres are foreign-born, and one researcher described how the interaction of these nationalities and their educational differences helped to foster breakthrough research. A recent book by W. Kerr, The Gift of Global Talent, further connects this global talent to important transformations (many good, some bad) in the businesses and economies of countries like the United States and United Kingdom

Economic Impacts of Immigration: A Survey

This paper surveys recent empirical studies on the economic impacts of immigration. The survey first examines the magnitude of immigration as an economic phenomenon in various host countries. The second part deals with the assimilation of immigrant workers into host-country labor markets and concomitant effects for natives. The paper then turns to immigration's impact for the public finances of host countries. The final section considers emerging topics in the study of immigration. The survey particularly emphasizes the recent experiences of Northern Europe and Scandinavia and relevant lessons from traditional destination countries like the US.

Global Collaborative Patents

We study the prevalence and traits of global collaborative patents for U.S. public companies, where the inventor team is located both within and outside of the United States. Collaborative patents are frequently observed when a corporation is entering into a new foreign region for innovative work, especially in settings where intellectual property protection is weak. We also connect collaborative patents to the ethnic composition of the firm’s U.S. inventors and cross-border mobility of inventors within the firm. The inventor team composition has important consequences for how the new knowledge is exploited within and outside of the firm

Entrepreneurship and Urban Growth: An Empirical Assessment with Historical Mines

Measures of entrepreneurship, such as average establishment size and the prevalence of start-ups, correlate strongly with employment growth across and within metropolitan areas, but the endogeneity of these measures bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near Pittsburgh led that city to specialization in industries, like steel, with significant scale economies and that those big firms led to a dearth of entrepreneurial human capital across several generations. We test this idea by looking at the spatial location of past mines across the United States: proximity to historical mining deposits is associated with bigger firms and fewer start-ups in the middle of the 20th century. We use mines as an instrument for our entrepreneurship measures and find a persistent link between entrepreneurship and city employment growth; this connection works primarily through lower employment growth of start-ups in cities that are closer to mines. These effects hold in cold and warm regions alike and in industries that are not directly related to mining, such as trade, finance and services. We use quantile instrumental variable regression techniques and identify mostly homogeneous effects throughout the conditional city growth distribution

Skilled Immigration and the Employment Structures

We study the impact of skilled immigrants on the employment structures of U.S. firms using matched employer-employee data. Unlike most previous work, we use the firm as the lens of analysis to account for a greater level of heterogeneity and the fact that many skilled immigrant admissions are driven by firms themselves (e.g., the H-1B visa). OLS and IV specifications find rising overall employment of skilled workers with increased skilled immigrant employment by firm. Employment expansion is greater for younger natives than their older counterparts, and departure rates for older workers appear higher for those in STEM occupations compared to younger workers

The Effect of Rehabilitative Punishments on Juvenile Crime and Labor Market Outcomes

This paper estimates the effect of a rehabilitative punishment on the post-release outcomes of juvenile criminals using a unique Finnish data set on sentences and punishments merged with the longitudinal population census for 1990-2007. The rehabilitative program was aimed at improving the social skills and labor market attachment of young offenders aged 15 to 17. A variety of research designs are used to isolate the effect of the juvenile punishment and to control for observable characteristics of the young offenders. The juvenile punishment experiment was initially conducted in certain criminal courts only and was applicable for youths aged under 18, giving rise to a differences-in-differences and triple differences setup. The juvenile punishment reduced reoffending during the year immediately after sentencing, but had no long-term effect on reoffending nor on labor market outcomes

The dynamics of gender earnings differentials: Evidence from establishment data

Despite dramatic workforce gains by women in recent decades, a substantial gender earnings gap persists and widens over the course of men’s and women’s careers. Since there are earnings differences across establishments, a key question is the extent to which the widening of the gender pay gap over time arises from differences in career advances within the same establishment versus differential gains from job-to-job moves across establishments. Using a unique match between the 2000 Decennial Census of the United States and the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) data, we find that both channels are important and affect workers differently by education. For the college-educated the increasing gap is for the most part due to differential earnings growth within establishment. The between-establishment component explains only 27 percent of the widening of the total gender pay gap for this group. For workers without college degree, the establishment component is the main driver of the, relatively small, widening of the gender earnings gap. For both education groups, marriage plays a crucial role in the establishment component of the increasing earnings gap.acceptedVersio

Post-Secondary Education and Information on Labor Market Prospects: A Randomized Field Experiment

We examine the impact of an information intervention offered to 97 randomly chosen high schools in Finland. Graduating students in treatment schools were surveyed and given information on the labor market prospects associated with detailed post-secondary programs. A third of the students report that the intervention led them to update their beliefs. Experimental estimates suggest that it also affected the application behavior of the least informed students. However, this group of affected students is not sufficiently large for the intervention to have an average impact on applications or enrollment