TY  - JOUR
AU  - Borjas, George J
AU  - Doran, Kirk B
TI  - Cognitive Mobility: Labor Market Responses to Supply Shocks in the Space of Ideas
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 18614
PY  - 2012
Y2  - December 2012
DO  - 10.3386/w18614
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18614
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18614.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
George J. Borjas
Harvard Kennedy School
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-1393
Fax: 617/495-9532
E-Mail: gborjas@harvard.edu

Kirk B. Doran
3060 Jenkins Nanovic Halls
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556
E-Mail: kdoran@nd.edu
M1  - published as George J. Borjas, Kirk B. Doran. "Cognitive Mobility: Labor Market Responses to Supply Shocks in the Space of Ideas," in Sarah Turner and William Kerr, organizers, "US High-Skilled Immigration in the Global Economy" (University of Chicago Press), Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 33, S1, part 2 (2015)

M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2013-04-29
AB  - Knowledge producers conducting research on a particular set of questions may respond to supply and demand shocks by shifting resources to a different set of questions. Cognitive mobility measures the transition from one location to another in idea space. We examine the cognitive mobility flows unleashed by the influx of Soviet mathematicians into the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The data reveal that American mathematicians moved away from fields that received large numbers of Soviet émigrés. Diminishing returns in specific research areas, rather than beneficial human capital spillovers, dominated the cognitive mobility decisions of knowledge producers.
ER  -