Immigration, Innovation, and the Geography of Growth

Posted by Nervous-Emotion28

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  1. Nervous-Emotion28 on

    Submission Statement: This is a new paper from NBER detailing the economic effects of mass migration into the United States from 1880 to 1920. According to the abstract:

    >Using a newly constructed dataset linking individual census records to historical immigration records and the universe of US patents, we highlight a new channel through which immigrants contributed to growth: they disproportionately settled in urban innovation hubs. […] We find that **international arrivals after 1880 raised US income per capita by 8.2% by 1940.** ***Removing the subsequent immigration restrictions of the 1920s would have raised income per capita by a further 1.7% by 2000.*** Immigrants’ skill composition and their concentration in urban hubs are key drivers of these effects.

    Relevance to the sub: free trade, open borders, doohickey innovation stations on every corner

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