The Supply Side of Innovation: H-1B Visa Reforms and US Ethnic Invention

Comments are appreciated and can be sent to wkerr@hbs.edu and wlincoln@umich.edu. We thank Sarah Rahman for excellent research assistance. We thank seminar participants at AEA, ERSA, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Harvard, ISIM, Michigan, MIT Sloan, NBER Innovation Policy and the Economy, NBER Labor Studies, NBER Productivity, and SOLE for helpful suggestions; we especially thank Lindsay Lowell and Debbie Strumsky for data assistance and Dan Aaronson, Ajay Agrawal, David Autor, Gadi Barlevy, Lisa Barrow, Charlie Brown, Jeff Campbell, Brendan Epstein, Richard Freeman, Jeff Furman, Luojia Hu, Jennifer Hunt, Larry Katz, Sari Kerr, Miles Kimball, Jacob Kirkegaard, Josh Lerner, Jim Levinsohn, Norm Matloff, Guy Michaels, Matt Mitchell, Ramana Nanda, Derek Neal, Paul Oyer, Jeff Smith, Dan Sullivan, and anonymous referees for their insights. This paper is a revised and shortened version of HBS Working Paper 09-005, and a subsequent version will be published in the Journal of Labor Economics. This research is supported by the Innovation Policy and the Economy group, Kauffman Foundation, Harvard Business School, the University of Michigan, the National Science Foundation, and the MIT George Shultz Fund. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.