Correspondence: andrea.morrison@unipv.it

Summary of the Session’s Theme and Objectives

This special session – or sessions – will explore the roles that skilled migrants can play in ideas generation, innovation and knowledge diffusion in firms, communities, cities and nations. Migrants are over-represented as inventors, star scientists and entrepreneurs, both through selection and sometimes deliberate policy. Globalisation has created further channels for knowledge generation and its diffusion – through diasporic networks, the operation of multinational firms, and cross-national networks of academics and other researchers. Immigration – and the diversity it produces – is also closely related to innovation, especially at micro and urban scales, and more broadly to urban economic complexity. International students are a key component of highly skilled migration, with a direct impact on innovation in host countries and possibly some diffusion effect in the home countries. A growing body of theory and evidence seeks to explain, and shows causal effects of international talent flows on innovation, productivity, trade and entrepreneurship (see reviews by Lissoni and Morrison 2025; Chodavadia et al 2024; Azoulay et al 2022; Ozgen 2021; Lissoni 2018; Akcigit et al 2017; Cooke and Kemeny 2017; Kerr et al 2017; Kerr et al 2015; Nathan 2014). 

List of Topics to Be Presented in the Special Session

• Mechanisms linking skilled migration and firm/city/nation/global economic outcomes;
• How effects play out across different industrial sectors and activities, and within different parts of firms and their value chains;
• How far cities and urban places may amplify these effects;
• How migration and diasporic linkages connect places into cross-national production systems;
• Distributional impacts of migration ~ performance links, and localised winners and losers;
• How recent/future ‘de-globalisation’ might affect these processes;
• Policy evaluations, for example on researcher mobility; high-skill visa programmes, etc;
• Studies using frontier methods and data sources, especially at-scale. 

Key References

Akcigit, U.; J. Grigsby; and T. Nicholas. 2017. Immigration and the Rise of American Ingenuity. American Economic Review 107:327-331.

Azoulay, P.; B.F. Jones; J.D. Kim; and J. Miranda. 2022. Immigration and Entrepreneurship in the United States. American Economic Review: Insights 4:71-88.

Chodavadia, S.A.; S. Pekkala Kerr; W.R. Kerr; and L.J. Maiden. 2024. Immigrant Entrepreneurship: New Estimates and a Research Agenda. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series No. 32400.

Cooke, A. and T. Kemeny. 2017. The economic geography of immigrant diversity: Disparate impacts and new directions. Geography Compass 11.

Kemeny, T. and A. Cooke. 2018. Spillovers from immigrant diversity in cities. Journal of Economic Geography 18:213-245.

Kerr, S.P.; W. Kerr; Ç. Özden; and C. Parsons. 2017. High-Skilled Migration and Agglomeration. Annual Review of Economics 9:201-234.

Lissoni F. and Morrison, A. (eds). 2025. Migration and Innovation: A research agenda. Cheltenham:  Edward Elgar. 

Nathan, M. 2014. The wider economic impacts of high-skilled migrants: a survey of the literature for receiving countries. IZA Journal of Migration 3:doi:10.1186/2193-9039-1183-1184.

Ozgen, C. 2021. The economics of diversity: Innovation, productivity and the labour market. Journal of Economic Surveys 35:1168-1216.