The Brain Gain: The Impact of Immigration on American Innovation with Rebecca Diamond
06 Mar 2024 (9 months ago)
Levi Strauss & Co.
- Levi Strauss & Co.'s historian, Tracy Panic, showcases the company's vault museum, which houses historical treasures dating back to the 1800s.
- Designers draw inspiration from the archived pieces to create new designs.
- Levi Strauss, an immigrant from Bavaria, found opportunity in America and collaborated with another immigrant, Jacob Davis, to create the first riveted pants, known as the 501s.
Immigration and Innovation
- Economist Rebecca Diamond discusses the role of immigrants in American innovation, highlighting the difficulty in quantifying their contributions.
- A new data source linking patent data with migration histories allows researchers to identify immigrant inventors.
- Immigrants play a disproportionate role in patent activity, with a higher share of inventors being immigrants and immigrant inventors having more patents over their lifetimes.
- Immigrants contribute 36% of the innovative output in the United States.
- Immigrant inventors have a global knowledge network that helps diffuse knowledge into the US patent system.
- The productivity of US-born inventors and workers is significantly impacted by the presence of immigrant inventors.
- Limiting immigration of highly skilled workers could have a significant negative impact on future innovation in the US.
Research and Collaboration
- The research team initially intended to study the migration location distortions of inventors but discovered the importance of immigrant inventors while exploring the data.
- Rebecca Diamond transitioned from studying physics to economics due to her interest in quantitative methods and the connection between math and real-world problems.
- Diamond finds joy in working with new data sets and combining them with theoretical frameworks to gain insights.
- Research involves a lot of failures, but the excitement of learning something new and making progress keeps researchers motivated.
- The video is about a podcast produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Nuum of Magnificent Noise for Stanford Graduate School of Business.
- The podcast is hosted by Kevin Cool and features professors from Stanford GSB discussing their research and ideas.
- The podcast is available on the Stanford GSB website, YouTube channel, and social media platforms.
Names:
- Levi Strauss
- Jacob Davis
- Tracy Panic
- Rebecca Diamond
- Jesse Baker
- Eric Nuum
- Kevin Cool