Emigration

Physics

Sociology

Business

International trade

International economics

Population

Mathematics

Demographic economics

Knowledge management

Diffusion

Statistics

Macroeconomics

Demography

Political science

Economics

Human migration

Productivity

Economic geography

Tacit knowledge

Proxy (statistics)

Computer science

Immigration

Thermodynamics

The Economic Journal

The diffusion of tacit knowledge involves direct human interactions. This implies that the international diffusion of knowledge should follow the pattern of international migration. We test this idea using cross‐country productivity spillovers leading to new exports as proxy for knowledge diffusion. We find that a 10% increase in immigration from exporters of a given product is associated with a 2% increase in the likelihood that the host country starts exporting that good ‘from scratch’ in the next decade. The results appear stronger for highly‐skilled migrants, qualitatively similar for emigrants and robust to instrumenting for migration in a gravity framework.

Migration, Knowledge Diffusion and the Comparative Advantage of Nations