Innovation in the global economy
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- International migration and international trade are two major components of the current globalization process. Their impact on the global economy has been studied extensively. This dissertation explores how international migration and trade influence global innovative activities. In particular, I study the trade flow and migration of skilled workers from developing countries to the U.S., and how such flows affect the U.S. as well as the source countries. In the first chapter, I study the migration of science and engineering (S& E) workers from non-OECD (i.e., developing) countries to the US. In particular, I evaluate the impact of such brain drain on both the US and the source countries using a multi-country endogenous growth model. The proposed framework introduces and quantifies a "frontier growth effect" of skilled migration: migrants from developing countries create more frontier knowledge in the U.S., and the non-rivalrous knowledge diffuses to all countries. In particular, each source country is able to adopt technology invented by migrants from other countries, a previously ignored externality of skilled migration. I quantify the model by matching both micro and macro moments, and then consider counterfactuals wherein U.S. immigration policy changes. My results suggest that a policy -- which doubles the number of immigrants from every non-OECD country -- would boost U.S. productivity growth by 0.1 percentage point per year, and improve average welfare in the U.S. by 3.3%. Such a policy can also benefit the source countries because of the "frontier growth effect". Taking India as an example source country, I find that the same policy would lead to faster long-run growth and a 0.9% increase in average welfare in India. This welfare gain in India is largely the result of additional non-Indian migrants, indicating the significance of the previously overlooked externality. The second chapter is co-authored with Kaiji Gong. We analyze the impact of rising Chinese import competition on innovative activities in the U.S. We adopt a similar identification strategy as in Autor et al. (2013), whereby we use Compustat firm-level data and industry- level trade data to exploit cross-industry variation in exposure to import competition. We find that U.S. firms on average reduce R& D investment when faced with more import com- petition from China. The negative effect is driven by smaller firms and highly leveraged firms. When we weight the firms by their initial sizes, the average impact of import com- petition became insignificant. Our findings cannot fully be explained by a simple story of negative demand shock. Further empirical exploration is needed to identify the channels through which import competition affects firm's R& D investment.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Xu, Rui |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics. |
| Primary advisor | Klenow, Peter J |
| Thesis advisor | Klenow, Peter J |
| Thesis advisor | Jones, Charles I. (Charles Irving) |
| Thesis advisor | Kurlat, Pablo |
| Advisor | Jones, Charles I. (Charles Irving) |
| Advisor | Kurlat, Pablo |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Rui Xu. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Rui Xu
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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