Featured Researcher: Megan MacGarvie
Megan MacGarvie, an associate professor in Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, became interested in economic history as an undergraduate at McGill University in Montreal. By the time she was a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, her interests had expanded to include international trade. She discovered that the development and diffusion of technology was a theme that was central to both fields, as was the question of why some countries are richer than others.
“As I started out looking at international trade, something became apparent,” she says. “Trade can be a channel for diffusion of technology, but mobility of people also is an important channel. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the international mobility of people, at immigrants and their tendencies to innovate or be entrepreneurs.”
These interests led to her directing, along with Ina Ganguli and Shulamit Kahn, an NBER project on the role of foreign-born individuals in contributing to economic dynamism in the US. The research papers associated with this project were published in The Roles of Immigrants and Foreign Students in US Science, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship.
“Many of the most entrepreneurial people in the United States are immigrants,” says MacGarvie, an NBER research associate affiliated with the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program. Her work with Kahn has shown that “some immigration policies make it harder for natives of certain countries — particularly China and India — to get permanent residency status and stay in the US.”
PhDs from these countries often specialize in STEM fields in which the demand for talented workers exceeds the supply of US natives. Immigration policies therefore constrain the contributions of foreign-born PhDs to American entrepreneurship and innovation.
In current work, MacGarvie has found that the number of international students coming to the US plateaued after about 2015. “We still attract a lot of very talented students but the rapid increase of earlier years slowed after 2015. In some areas there was a sharp decline (although there is some indication in the most recent data that this may be reversing),” she says. In current research, she and Ganguli find that the UK, Canada, and Australia appear to be substitute destinations for potential immigrants.
