The relationship between immigration diversity and technological novelty:cross-country evidence

Immigrant diversity is a double-edged sword for economic growth,while its influence on radical innovation is still being explored.In this paper,we aim to analyze the relationship between immigration diversity and technological novelty at the cross-country level.We combine the ADOP and OECD REGPAT databases to distinguish the negative and positive effects of immigrant diversity on innovation.Our results show that the diversity of skilled immigrants fosters technological novelty in receiving countries,a finding that still holds after a sequence of robustness tests.Besides,the unrelated diversity of skilled immigrants is more important than the related diversity,which can be reinforced by more frequent knowledge interactions between different clusters of sending countries.