Search Results
Journal Article
U.S. ethnic scientists and entrepreneurs
Immigrants are exceptionally important for U.S. technology development, accounting for almost half of the country?s Ph.D. workforce in science and engineering. Most notably, the contribution of Chinese and Indian scientists and entrepreneurs in U.S. high-technology sectors increased dramatically in the 1990s. These ethnic scientific communities in the United States further help transfer new technologies back to their home countries.
Working Paper
Agglomeration and innovation
Draft chapter for the forthcoming Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, Vols. 5A and 5B This paper reviews academic research on the connections between agglomeration and innovation. The authors first describe the conceptual distinctions between invention and innovation. They then discuss how these factors are frequently measured in the data and note some resulting empirical regularities. Innovative activity tends to be more concentrated than industrial activity, and the authors discuss important findings from the literature about why this is so. The authors highlight the traits of ...
Conference Paper
U.S. ethnic scientists and foreign direct investment (FDI) placement patterns
William Kerr?s analysis looked at how knowledge is transferred across countries through ethnic research communities. He finds that the ethnic composition of inventors in a company affects where a firm decides to invest. The idea is that if a company has a core set of researchers from a specific ethnic community, it more likely to engage in foreign direct investment in that country, as well. Kerr concludes that these ethnic research communities create knowledge channels that facilitate the transfer of technology across countries.