Migration of skilled workers and innovation: a European perspective

This paper analyses the effect of skilled migration on two measures of innovation, patenting and bibliometric data, in a panel of 20 European countries between 1995 and 2008. The empirical findings show that a larger pool of migrants in the skilled professions is associated with higher levels of knowledge creation. Skilled migrants contribute both to the creation of “private” knowledge, measured by the number of patent applications through the Patent Cooperation Treaty, and to more “public” basic research, measured by the number of citations to published articles.