Authors:

  • Prithwiraj Choudhury

Excerpt

Contextual Knowledge and Ethnic Migrant Inventors. Prithwiraj Choudhury, 2017, Paper, "We study the role of ethnic Chinese/Indian migrant inventors in transferring contextual knowledge across borders and the role of ethnic networks in further disseminating such knowledge. Using a unique dataset of herbal patents filed in the United States by western firms and universities, we test whether contextual knowledge is codified in the west by ethnic migrant inventors and spread by their ethnic networks. Our identification comes from an exogenous shock to the quota of H1B visas, and a list of institutions that were exempted from the shock. We generate a control group of non-herbal patents that have similar medicinal purposes as our herbal patents through textual matching. Using this framework, we estimate a triple differences equation, and find that herbal patents are likely to be filed by Chinese/Indian migrant inventors and are likely to be initially cited by other Chinese/Indian inventors." Link