Immigration and Innovation: Chinese Graduate Students in U.S. Universities

Abstract

Immigration is rapidly changing the composition of the R&D workforce in the United States, with important implications for both management and public policy. We study here the Chinese chemists and chemical engineers who migrate to the United States for their graduate studies. We analyze productivity at the individual researcher level, thus bypassing the identification issues that earlier studies had to confront when analyzing the relationship between immigration and innovation at the university or firm level. Using new data and measurement techniques, we find robust evidence that Chinese students make disproportionate contributions to the scientific output of their advisors and departments. We attribute this result to a selection effect as it is relatively more difficult for Chinese students to gain admission into U.S. PhD programs. Our results strengthen the case for liberal student migration policies.

Money to move: The effect on researchers of an international mobility grant

“…Third, we contribute to the literature on academic mobility. Seminal contributions in this area have shown that mobile researchers have higher productivity (Franzoni et al, 2014;Gaulé and Piacentini, 2013;Hunter et al, 2009;Stephan and Levin, 2001), and broader international collaboration networks (Scellato et al, 2015) than non-mobile researchers. However, it remains unexplored what are the effects of financial support to mobility.…”