German-Jewish Emigres and U.S. Invention

Petra Moser, Alessandra Voena, Fabian Waldinger

NBER Working Paper No. 19962
Issued in March 2014
NBER Program(s):Development of the American Economy, Labor Studies, Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

Historical accounts suggest that Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany revolutionized U.S. science. To analyze the émigrés' effects on chemical innovation in the U.S. we compare changes in patenting by U.S. inventors in research fields of émigrés with fields of other German chemists. Patenting by U.S. inventors increased by 31 percent in émigré fields. Regressions that instrument for émigré fields with pre-1933 fields of dismissed German chemists confirm a substantial increase in U.S. invention. Inventor-level data indicate that émigrés encouraged innovation by attracting new researchers to their fields, rather than by increasing the productivity of incumbent inventors.

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w19962

Published: Moser, Petra, Alessandra Voena, and Fabian Waldinger. 2014. "German Jewish Émigrés and US Invention." American Economic Review, 104 (10): 3222-55.

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