Location: Cambridge, MA

Description: The Role of Immigrants and Foreign Students  in Science, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship
Abstract submission deadline: Oct. 31, 2017

To promote research on the role of immigrants and foreign students in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workforce, and their impact on innovation, productivity, knowledge diffusion and entrepreneurship, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with the support of the National Science Foundation Science of Science and Innovation Policy Program and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, will hold a research conference on April 27, 2018.  The conference will be organized by Richard Freeman (Harvard University and NBER), Ina Ganguli (University of Massachusetts at Amherst), Shulamit Kahn (Boston University), William Kerr (Harvard University and NBER), and Megan MacGarvie (Boston University and NBER). The goals of the conference are to stimulate and share academic research on high-skilled immigration and the STEM labor force, to synthesize and disseminate this research to the policy and business communities, and to engage in dialogue with these communities to inform researchers about unanswered questions.   

Submissions of original research related to the conference theme are welcome, including, but not limited to, the following topics:

•  What are the impacts of changes in the supply of high-skilled immigrants and foreign students on: scientific research, knowledge diffusion, innovation, or natives’ educational choices and occupational outcomes?

•  How have shifts in immigration policies affected high-skilled immigration? What can we learn from historical evidence on high-skilled immigration and innovation? What are the barriers, if any, to the full utilization of high-skilled immigrants’ human capital in receiving countries?

•  What economic, political and cultural factors within the US and in home countries affect return migration of highly skilled foreign immigrants and students?  How significant a threat to the US STEM labor force is this return migration likely to be? How does return migration affect international research collaboration and knowledge diffusion?

•  What explains differences in rates of entrepreneurship between natives and immigrants? Are the explanations the same or different for science-based and high-tech start-ups?