Dr Thomas Fackler

•Emigration can lead to an increase in patenting in origin countries.•These positive effects are driven by knowledge flows triggered by emigrants.•Emigration does not increase the asymmetries in patenting between more and less advanced countries.•Origin countries can gain from the initial brain drain through knowledge remittances. Does the emigration of skilled individuals necessarily result in losses for source countries due to a brain drain? Combining industry-level patenting and migration data from 32 European countries, we show that emigration positively contributes to innovation in source countries and does not increase asymmetries in innovation levels between more and less advanced countries. We use changes in the labour mobility legislation within Europe as exogenous variation to establish causality. In addition, by analysing patent citation data, we provide evidence that these positive effects are driven by knowledge flows triggered by migrants. While skilled migrants are not inventing in their home country anymore, they contribute to cross-border knowledge and technology diffusion.

Is compulsory licensing an effective antitrust remedy to increase innovation? To answer this question, we analyze the 1956 consent decree that settled an antitrust lawsuit against Bell, a vertically integrated monopolist charged with foreclosing the telecommunications equipment market. Bell was forced to license all its existing patents royalty-free, including those not related to telecommunications. We identify the effect of the consent decree on follow-on innovations building on Bell patents by using exactly matched non-Bell patents as control group. We show that the consent decree led to a lasting increase in innovation but only in markets outside the telecommunications sector.

The extensive literature on university graduates' regional mobility highlights the importance of early mobility, but is primarily descriptive. We contribute to the identification of the effect of mobility upon high-school graduation on subsequent mobility across labour market regions. The data permit a novel identification strategy that uses the distance to university as an instrument. To ensure comparability, we select high-school graduates from only the suburban region of a large German agglomeration in a university graduate survey. We find that early mobility leads to a sizable increase in later labour mobility, which has implications for labour market efficiency and distributional policy concerns.