Return migration and distributed R & D in multinationals : a study using micro data

Is the phenomenon of multinational firms (MNCs) conducting distributed R&D across emerging markets related to the return migration of engineers and scientists from the U.S. to emerging markets? I hypothesize that local inventors at emerging market R&D centers of MNCs face constraints in securing resources from the headquarters for knowledge creation projects and that returnees can act as resource brokers. I then test for whether or not reporting to a returnee manager leads to higher patenting. I test this using hand-collected employment, travel, demographic and patent data for 1315 inventors at a Fortune 50 multinational R&D center in India. To account for endogenity and selection in measuring the impact of returnee managers, I consider new graduates, for whom manager assignment is plausibly random. I find that having a returnee manager leads to higher patenting. I also find support for the resource brokerage role of returnees - having a returnee manager leads to higher patenting but not higher headquarter co-patentees or patent citations back at the headquarters. In summary, this is one of the first empirical studies of return migration and multinationals using firm level micro data