Free Movement of Inventors: Open-Border Policy and Innovation in Switzerland

Cristelli, Gabriele; Lissoni, Francesco

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3728867

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…However, testing whether the innovation was performed effectively by the new foreign workers and whether the upgraded product was responsible for the differential response in exports is an impossible task due to the lack of firm-level information on trade and detailed information on the person that actually undertook the innovation. While Cristelli and Lissoni (2020) find an increase in R&D personnel and in the patent activity following the AFMP, Ruffner and Siegenthaler (2016) show that localities highly exposed to the labor supply shock did not experience any product innovation and that the likelihood of improving existing products increased only for the subset of firms that experienced difficulties in hiring qualified R&D personnel. Therefore, this channel is unlikely to represent the main cause of the quality improvement.…”

Section: How Could Foreign Workers Improve Swiss Products?mentioning

confidence: 92%

“…More broadly, this paper contributes to the literature pointing at the positive effects of foreign workers on the economy. This research strand focuses on FDI activity (Kugler and Rapoport, 2007;Javorcik et al, 2011;Burchardi et al, 2019), productivity (Kerr and Lincoln, 2010;Ghosh et al, 2014;Hornung, 2014;Ruffner and Siegenthaler, 2016;Mayda et al, 2018;Mitaritonna et al, 2018), and innovation (Cristelli and Lissoni, 2020;Gray et al, 2020). My analysis provides another dimension in which foreign workers are beneficial to the economy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Foreign workers, product quality, and trade: Evidence from a natural experiment

Ariu

2022

Journal of International Economics

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Section: How Could Foreign Workers Improve Swiss Products?mentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foreign workers, product quality, and trade: Evidence from a natural experiment

Ariu

2022

Journal of International Economics

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“…Previous research has frequently documented well that high-skilled immigrants foster domestic innovation in the receiving countries (see e.g. Bahar et al, 2020;Cristelli and Lissoni, 2020;Kerr and Lincoln, 2010). Thus, technological clusters which attract higher numbers of non-western patent inventors could have substantially benefited thereof.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

'Moving On' -- Investigating Inventors' Ethnic Origins Using Supervised Learning

Niggli¹

2022

Preprint

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Patent data provides rich information about technical inventions, but does not disclose the ethnic origin of inventors. In this paper, I use supervised learning techniques to infer this information. To do so, I construct a dataset of 95 202 labeled names and train an artificial recurrent neural network with long-short-term memory (LSTM) to predict ethnic origins based on names. The trained network achieves an overall performance of 91% across 17 ethnic origins.I use this model to classify and investigate the ethnic origins of 2.68 million inventors and provide novel descriptive evidence regarding their ethnic origin composition over time and across countries and technological fields. The global ethnic origin composition has become more diverse over the last decades, which was mostly due to a relative increase of Asian origin inventors. Furthermore, the prevalence of foreign-origin inventors is especially high in the USA, but has also increased in other high-income economies. This increase was mainly driven by an inflow of non-western inventors into emerging high-technology fields for the USA, but not for other high-income countries.

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“…Borjas and Doran's (2012) work on former soviet mathematicians in the US suggest instead a strong crowding-out effect. Evidence available for Europe, both Europe-wide (Bosetti et al, 2015;Fassio et al, 2019) and on specific countries (Bratti & Conti, 2018;Cristelli & Lissoni, 2020;Ozgen et al, 2012), though limited, confirm that the inventive activity of immigrants has a positive effect on innovation.…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 97%

Migrant inventors as agents of technological change

Morrison¹,

Miguélez

2022

J Technol Transf

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How do regions enter new and distant technological fields? Who is triggering this process? This work addresses these compelling research questions by investigating the role of migrant inventors in the process of technological diversification. Immigrant inventors can indeed act as carriers of knowledge across borders and influence the direction of technological change. We test these latter propositions by using an original dataset of immigrant inventors in the context of European regions during the period 2003–201. Our findings show that: immigrant inventors generate positive local knowledge spillovers; they help their host regions to develop new technological specialisations; they trigger a process of unrelated diversification. Their contribution comes via two main mechanisms: immigrant inventors use their own personal knowledge (knowledge creation); they import knowledge from their home country to the host region (knowledge transfer). Their impact is maximised when their knowledge is not recombined with the local one (in mixed teams of inventors), but it is reused (in teams made by only migrant inventors). Our work contributes to the existing literature of regional diversification by providing fresh evidence of unrelated diversification for European regions and by identifying important agents of structural change. It also contributes to the literature of migration and innovation by adding fresh evidence on European regions and by unveiling some of the mechanisms of immigrants’ knowledge transmission.

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Free Movement of Inventors: Open-Border Policy and Innovation in Switzerland

Cited by 12 publications

References 63 publications

Foreign workers, product quality, and trade: Evidence from a natural experiment

Foreign workers, product quality, and trade: Evidence from a natural experiment

'Moving On' -- Investigating Inventors' Ethnic Origins Using Supervised Learning

Migrant inventors as agents of technological change

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