Highly Skilled Migration and International Flows of Talent, Knowledge, and Capital – TKC

TKC project aims to improve our understanding of the way in which highly skilled migrants activate their social networks and leverage their role as international gatekeepers, and to what extent they contribute to solve cross-border information and agency problems. TKC’s working hypothesis is that highly skilled workers can be regarded as national or ethnic as well as professional diasporas, which create trust and pass information over long distances, thus reducing international transaction costs. We also consider their role in the diffusion of technical knowledge, as documented in both the historical literature and recent economic and sociological scholarship. TKC is a theoretical and empirical project, whose deliverables will consist in research papers and open access datasets. It is also a project centred on policy-relevant issues, whose ambition is to enrich the debate on migration on a global scale, but especially in Europe and France, where the dominant focus on low skilled or refugee immigration both obscures the importance of highly skilled flows and contributes to negative stereotyping. TKC will be articulated in six work-packages, as follows:

WP.1. Global talent flows: a theoretical review
WP.2. Global talent flows: stylized facts
WP.3. Highly skilled migration and the internationalization of science and technology
WP.4. Highly skilled migrants and firms’ internationalization
WP.5. Ethnic networks and the international diffusion of ideas
WP.6. Coordination and dissemination

TKC takes a complementary approach between the macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis. It tests the hypotheses at the aggregate country level in WP.3 (macro); then it incorporates the role of the firm in WP.4 (meso); and finally it goes down to the role of the individual, high-skilled migrant in WP.5 (micro). TKC’s research topic stands at the cross-roads of different disciplinary approaches, ranging from the geography of innovation, the economics of migration, and international business studies. All of them can re-examined within the general theoretical framework of diaspora economics.

TKC has a strong engagement towards collecting micro-data concerning specific categories of very highly skilled workers, such as inventors or executives, with the migrant status to be ascertained by available biographic information and/or name analysis. These data may both provide a suitable and interesting alternative to more classic data sources, both because of their detail and for their pointing at homogenous professional groups, rather than generically tertiary educated workers.