Migration and Innovation: Learning from Patent and Inventor Data

Abstract

Migration and innovation have gone together since the dawn of human history. It was migration from the Near East that brought farming to the European continent in the Neolithic period (Skoglund et al. 2012). About 10,000 years later, in 1685, it was Huguenot refugees escaping persecution in France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes that brought to Prussia the most advanced textile technologies (Scoville 1952; Hornung 2014). In the US experience, a well-known episode is that of the scientists of Jewish origins who, fleeing Germany in the 1930s after the Nazi party’s rise to power, brought their knowledge in several fields of chemistry and physics (Moser, Voena, and Waldinger 2014).