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CERGE-EI invites you to the ADEMU lecture ‘Sovereign Debt and Structural Reforms’, delivered by Italian economist Fabrizio Zilibotti.

The lecture will present a dynamic theory of sovereign debt and structural reforms with three interacting frictions: limited enforcement, limited commitment, and incomplete markets, which was examined in Professor Zilibotti’s 2016 paper of the same name.

Currently professor of economics at University College London and Stockholm University and chair of the Macroeconomics and Political Economy at the University of Zurich, Professor Zilibotti will take up a position at Yale University in 2017.

For further information about the lecture, please contact Radim Bohacek at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Prof. Francesco Lissoni

GREThA (Groupe de Recherche en Économie Théorique et Appliquée), University of Bordeaux, France

Authors: Stefano Breschi, Francesco Lissoni, and Ernest Miguelez

Abstract: We assess the role of ethnic ties in the diffusion of technical knowledge using a database of patents filed by US‐resident inventors of foreign origin, identified by name analysis. We consider ten leading source countries, both Asian and European, of highly skilled migration to the US and test whether foreign inventors’ patents are disproportionately cited by (i) co‐ethnic migrants (“diaspora” effect), and (ii) inventors residing in their country of origin (“brain gain” effect). We find evidence of the diaspora effect for the Asian but not the European countries, with the exception of Russia. A diaspora effect does not necessarily translate into a brain gain effect, most notably for India where no such effect is detected. Neither does a brain gain effect occur solely in conjunction with a diaspora effect. Overall, diaspora and brain gain effects carry less weight than other channels of knowledge transmission, most notably co‐invention networks and multinational companies.

Keywords: migration, brain gain, diaspora, diffusion, inventors, patents

JEL codes: F22, O15, O31

Full Text:  “Foreign‐origin inventors in the US: Testing for Diaspora and Brain Gain Effects”