Scientist Migration and the Direction of Biomedical Research

In this Academic Seminar, Karthik Sastry will discuss his paper “Scientist Migration and the Direction of Biomedical Research.”

Speaker: Karthik Sastry is an Associate Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University.

Whether attending in person or virtually, please register in advance. 

Paper Abstract: Scientist migration may create economies of scale, but it may also alter which problems receive scientific attention. In this project, we combine global scientist research histories with detailed publication-level topic categorization and country-level disease burden to estimate how international moves affect research productivity and direction. Our empirical strategy leverages a matched-control designto compare international migrant scientists to stayers with similar research careers, productivity, and interests.

We find that researchers become more productive when they move to socioeconomically developed countries: for example, an average mover from India to the US writes 27% more quality-adjusted paper in the next ten years. However, these moves sharply redirect researchers’ interests toward the set of diseases that affect the destination country and away from the diseases that affect the origin country.

An average mover spends 29% less effort studying the top origin-affecting diseases and 45% more effort studying top destination-affecting diseases. These re-direction effects can often outweigh the productivity effects; for example, a researcher moving from India to the US leads them to produce 20% less research output on the top India-affecting diseases despite the fact that her overall research productivity goes up, while producing 115% more output on the top US-affecting diseases. These findings show that scientific migration creates winners and losers by simultaneously reallocates affecting research capacity and direction, creating an uneven geographic redistribution of health-relevant knowledge across contexts.

Speaker Bio: Karthik Sastry is an Associate Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He studies macroeconomics. One strand of his research focuses on how technology diffuses globally and, in particular, how the geographic concentration of innovation affects the pace and direction of technological progress. In other work, he studies how societies adapt to climate change through policy changes and technological innovation and how bounded rationality and social dynamics shape economic fluctuations.