Agenda

 Prof. Max Nathan

We look at the effects of skilled migrants and migrant diversity on firm productivity, using a novel worker-firm dataset – leveraging millions of online profiles – to identify impacts and mechanisms. In theory, migration can boost firms’ productivity through improving human capital, facilitating task specialisation or via diverse teams’ role in ideas generation. Urban location may amplify these effects. A growing body of evidence finds support for these mechanisms, and overall migration-productivity effects, although effect sizes vary considerably across countries, industries and workflows. Two major challenges here are the lack of employer-employee datasets in many countries, and limitations in coverage / dimensionality in those that do exist. Data from online platforms and the web may help meet these challenges. We link over 3m individual education/career histories from the Diffbot knowledge graph to the UK company register, alongside financial data from Orbis Historical, 2007-2024. We run a series of diagnostics and validation tests on the data stack. Focusing on medium and large firms across a range of sectors, we define migrants through name, language and countries of education and use panel and GMM/IV settings for identification. In extensions we explore relative contributions of seniority, migrant human capital, task specialisation and migrant diversity. 

Bio

Max Nathan is Professor of Economic Geography at CASA, University College London, an associate in the CEP Urban Programme and a Research Fellow at IZA. He is an economic geographer with a background in public policy. His work looks at urban economic development, especially innovation systems and clusters; immigration and diversity; and public policy for cities. Before academia Max worked in think tanks, consultancy and central government. He co-founded the Centre for Cities think tank in 2004, and the What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth in 2013, where he was a Deputy Director until 2021.