Global Mobility of Research Scientists

Chapter 5

Who Leaves and Who Stays? Evidence on Immigrant Selection from the Collapse of Soviet Science

Ina Ganguli     University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

Abstract

I draw upon the end of the Soviet Union and the subsequent emigration of scientists westward to provide new estimates of immigrant selection. I use a large unique dataset of over 15,000 Russian scientists across many fields of science who were publishing in the top Soviet journals just before the end of the USSR. The results show that on a number of observable characteristics, emigrant scientists look very different from those who stayed at home. The emigrants were more likely to be men, were younger, and were selected from the upper part of the productivity distribution. I ...