The effect of immigration on innovation in Italy

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of immigration on innovation in Italy, a country characterized by prevalently unskilled immigration. After addressing the potential endogeneity of the share of immigrants in the population using immigrant enclaves, no evidence is found of either positive or negative effects of migrants on innovation. This result is robust to allowing for different effects of low- and medium-high-skilled migrants, to using linear and non-linear models, and to considering both province-level data on patent applications and firm-level self-reported measures also capturing innovation adoption.