The Brain Gain: The Impact of Immigration on American Innovation with Rebecca Diamond

Levi Strauss & Co.

• Levi Strauss & Co.'s historian, Tracy Panic, showcases the company's vault museum, which houses historical treasures dating back to the 1800s.
• Designers draw inspiration from the archived pieces to create new designs.
• Levi Strauss, an immigrant from Bavaria, found opportunity in America and collaborated with another immigrant, Jacob Davis, to create the first riveted pants, known as the 501s.

Immigration and Innovation

• Economist Rebecca Diamond discusses the role of immigrants in American innovation, highlighting the difficulty in quantifying their contributions.
• A new data source linking patent data with migration histories allows researchers to identify immigrant inventors.
• Immigrants play a disproportionate role in patent activity, with a higher share of inventors being immigrants and immigrant inventors having more patents over their lifetimes.
• Immigrants contribute 36% of the innovative output in the United States.
• Immigrant inventors have a global knowledge network that helps diffuse knowledge into the US patent system.
• The productivity of US-born inventors and workers is significantly impacted by the presence of immigrant inventors.
• Limiting immigration of highly skilled workers could have a significant negative impact on future innovation in the US.

Research and Collaboration

• The research team initially intended to study the migration location distortions of inventors but discovered the importance of immigrant inventors while exploring the data.
• Rebecca Diamond transitioned from studying physics to economics due to her interest in quantitative methods and the connection between math and real-world problems.
• Diamond finds joy in working with new data sets and combining them with theoretical frameworks to gain insights.
• Research involves a lot of failures, but the excitement of learning something new and making progress keeps researchers motivated.

Podcast Information

• The video is about a podcast produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Nuum of Magnificent Noise for Stanford Graduate School of Business.
• The podcast is hosted by Kevin Cool and features professors from Stanford GSB discussing their research and ideas.
• The podcast is available on the Stanford GSB website, YouTube channel, and social media platforms. Names:
• Levi Strauss
• Jacob Davis
• Tracy Panic
• Rebecca Diamond
• Jesse Baker
• Eric Nuum
• Kevin Cool