Description:

Speaker: Davide Coluccia

Title: Return Innovation: The Knowledge Spillovers of the British Migration to the United States, 1870-1940

Abstract: How does innovation diffuse across countries? In this paper, we document that out-migration generates a flow of technology from the country of destination to the country of origin of migrants. During the Age of Mass Migration, nearly four million British immigrants settled in the US. We construct a novel individual-level dataset linking British immigrants in the US to the UK census, and we digitize the universe of UK patents over 1853-1899. Through a new shift-share instrument for bilateral migration and a triple-differences design, we document that exposure to US technology through migrant ties contributes to the diffusion of innovation to the UK in 1870-1940. Using high-dimensional text analysis, we find that migrant ties promote technology transfer, but they also nurture the production of original innovation. The individual-level analysis indicates that this "return innovation" effect does not require the physical return of emigrants. Instead, we find that migration linkages generate information flows that facilitate the cross-border diffusion of knowledge.