The Brain Gain: The Impact of Immigration on American Innovation with Rebecca Diamond

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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.

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.

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