Does the emigration of skilled individuals necessarily result in losses for source countries due to the brain drain …? Combining industry-level patenting and migration data from 32 European countries, we show that emigration in fact positively …

Emigration of young, motivated individuals may deprive countries-of-origin of entrepreneurs. We isolate exogenous … variation in a large emigration wave from Italy between 2008 and 2015 by interacting diaspora networks with economic pull … factors in destination countries, and find that larger emigration rates reduced firm creation and innovative start-ups. We …