TY  - JOUR
AU  - Kuhn,Peter J.
AU  - McAusland,Carol
TI  - The International Migration of Knowledge Workers: When is Brain Drain Beneficial?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12761
PY  - 2006
Y2  - December 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12761
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12761.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Peter J. Kuhn
Department of Economics
University of California, Santa Barbara
2127 North Hall
Santa Barbara, CA  93106
Tel: 805/893-3666
Fax: 805/893-8830
E-Mail: pjkuhn@econ.ucsb.edu

Carol McAusland
Food and Resource Economics
337-2357 Main Mall
University of British Columbia
Vancouver BC
Canada V6T 1Z4
E-Mail: carol.mcausland@ubc.ca
AB  - We consider the welfare effects of the emigration of workers who produce a public good (knowledge). We distinguish between the knowledge diversion and knowledge creation effects of such emigration, and show that the remaining residents of a country can gain from emigration, even when tastes for knowledge goods exhibit a kind of 'home bias'. In contrast to existing models of beneficial brain drain (BBD), our results do not require agglomeration economies, education-related externalities, remittances, return migration, or an emigration 'lottery'. Instead, they are driven purely by the public nature of knowledge goods, combined with differences in market size that induce greater knowledge creation by emigrants abroad than at home. BBD is even more likely in the presence of weak sending-country intellectual property rights (IPRs), or when source country IPR policy is endogenized.
ER  -