TY  - JOUR
AU  - Agrawal,Ajay
AU  - Kapur,Devesh
AU  - McHale,John
TI  - Brain Drain or Brain Bank? The Impact of Skilled Emigration on Poor-Country Innovation
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14592
PY  - 2008
Y2  - December 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14592
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14592.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Ajay K. Agrawal
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto
105 St. George Street
Toronto, ON M5S 3E6
CANADA
Tel: 416/946-0203
Fax: 416/978-5433
E-Mail: ajay.agrawal@rotman.utoronto.ca

Devesh Kapur
3600 Market Street, Suite 560
Centre for Advanced Study of India
University of Pennsylvania
E-Mail: dkapur@sas.upenn.edu

John McHale
Queen's School of Business
Goodes Hall
143 Union Street
Kingston, Ontario
Canada K7L 3N6
E-Mail: john.mchale@nuigalway.ie
AB  - The development prospects of a poor country depend in part on its capacity for innovation.  The productivity of its innovators depends in turn on their access to technological knowledge.  The emigration of highly skilled individuals weakens local knowledge networks (brain drain), but may also help remaining innovators access valuable knowledge accumulated abroad (brain bank).  We develop a model in which the size of the optimal innovator diaspora depends on the competing strengths of co-location and diaspora effects for accessing knowledge.  Then, using patent citation data associated with inventions from India, we estimate the key co-location and diaspora parameters; the net effect of innovator emigration is to harm domestic knowledge access, on average.  However, knowledge access conferred by the diaspora is particularly valuable in the production of India's most important inventions as measured by citations received.  Thus, our findings imply that the optimal emigration level may depend, at least partly, on the relative value resulting from the most cited compared to average inventions.
ER  -