Petra Moser

Immigration Boosts Innovation

In a recent study published by the American Economic Review, Petra Moser and her co-authors looked at the effect of Jewish émigrés from Germany during World War II on American innovators and innovation. Their study finds a significant increase in innovation – in fields entered by immigrants, there is a 30% increase in patents by domestic inventors. These benefits are driven at least in part by contacts between immigrants and native inventors. One of the mechanisms at play is that American inventors come into contact with new sets of ideas and methods that they then use for their own work.

Petra Moser's research combines methods from empirical microeconomics and economic history to examine the determinants of creativity and innovation. She uses historical variation in patent and copyright laws to examine the effects of intellectual property on science, technological innovation and artistic creativity. Her research also investigates the impact of immigrants on US innovation and examines the biological underpinnings of individual-level differences in entrepreneurship and creativity. She has received an NSF CAREER grant and a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS).

Petra Moser is Associate Professor of Economics and Jules I. Backman Faculty Fellow at the Stern School of Business at New York University (NYU Stern). Prior to his appointment, she taught at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was an undergraduate student at the University of Tübingen in Germany and a Fulbright Student at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She received her MA in International Relations from Yale University and holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.