High-skilled immigration and innovation
In this paper, Mayda et al. analyze the impact of skilled migrants on French firms from 1995 to 2010. The authors use data from four sources: (i) matched employer-employee French data (Déclaration Annuelle des Donnée Sociales – DADS), (ii) balance sheet information (FICUS/FARE), (iii) firm-level patenting data sourced by Orbis and (iv) historical patenting data for French districts in the 19th and 20th century sourced by INPI (National Industrial Property Institute). They find that:
- Skilled immigrants trigger a within-firm re-organization of tasks by which skilled native workers specialize in communication-intensive, managerial tasks while skilled immigrant workers specialize in technical, research-intensive tasks. Therefore, each group of workers is reallocated towards the tasks in which they have a comparative advantage.
- As a result, between 1995 and 2010, the arrival of skilled migrants in a French district significantly raised the number of patents. Namely, a 10% increase in the district-level share of skilled immigrants led to an increase, on average, of 2.6 patents per 10,000 manufacturing workers.
The patenting effect of skilled migration is not restricted to the French case. Recent evidence suggests that our findings might extend to other destination countries in Europe. A recent report by the World Bank on skilled migration to Europe shows that “the number of high-skilled migrants in the EU, defined as migrants with some tertiary education, more than tripled over the period 2004–18, increasing from about 4 million to 13 million” (World Bank 2022).
Skilled immigration, task allocation, and the innovation of firms
Authors: Anna Maria Mayda, Gianluca Orefice, Gianluca Santoni
From: Georgetown University, University Paris-Dauphine, CEPII
Immigration and wealth
Advani et al. use of confidential, anonymous data on the universe of taxpayers in the UK, from 1997 to 2018, to study the role that immigration plays at the top of the income distribution. More specifically, the authors exploit the process by which National Insurance Numbers (NINOs) – the UK’s Social Security Numbers – are assigned to identify migrants arriving since the Second World War, and in more recent years cross-check this with administrative microdata on migrant workers. The authors use this data to examine the rise in top income migrants, their sources of income, and their contribution to measured growth in the top income share.
[W]e show migrants are over-represented at the top of the income distribution, with migrants twice as prevalent in the top 0.01% as anywhere in the bottom 97%. These high incomes are predominantly from labour, rather than capital, and migrants are concentrated in only a handful of industries, predominantly finance. Almost all (90%) of the observed growth in the UK top 1% income share over the past 20 years has accrued to migrants.
Immigration and the Top 1 Percent
Authors: Arun Advani, Felix Koenig, Lorenzo Pessina, Andy Summers
From: University of Warwick, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, London School of Economics
