Abstract:
Does the emigration of high-skilled individuals necessarily reduce innovation in the source country due to the loss of human capital? Combining industry- and inventor-level patenting and migration data from 30 European countries, we show that emigration can positively contribute to patenting in source countries due to the existence of reverse knowledge flows.
Both OLS and IV regressions suggest that bilateral knowledge flows (measured by cross-border citations and collaborations) increase in the number of high-skilled migrants. While the high-skilled migrants are not inventing in their home country anymore, they contribute to cross-border knowledge and technology diffusion and thus help poorer countries to catch up to the technology frontier.