Authors:

  • Prithwiraj Choudhury

Excerpt

The Ethnic Migrant Inventor Effect: Codification and Recombination of Knowledge Across Borders. Prithwiraj Choudhury, October 22, 2018, Paper, "Ethnic migrant inventors may differ from locals in terms of the knowledge they bring to host firms. Using a unique dataset of Chinese and Indian herbal patents filed in the United States, we find that an increase in the supply of first‐generation ethnic migrant inventors increases the rate of codification of herbal knowledge at U.S. assignees by 4.5 percent. Our identification comes from an exogenous shock to the quota of H1B visas and from a list of entities exempted from the shock. We also find that ethnic migrant inventors are more likely to engage in reuse of knowledge previously locked within the cultural context of their home regions, whereas knowledge recombination is more likely to be pursued by teams comprising inventors from other ethnic backgrounds." Link