Internal Migration of the U.S. inventors

The steady decline in internal migration in the United States has recently been reported by several scholars (Molloy et al. 2011). These findings are potentially worrying, since the drop in internal migration may have a severe impact on the national economy through the disturbed flexibility of the labor market. This paper aims to contribute to the state of knowledge on declining mobility in the United States. It focuses on inventors that received at least one patent at the US Patent and Trademarks Office, as their mobility is regarded as a possible source of knowledge spillovers (Almeida, Kogut 1999) and therefore has a twofold effect on the economy, since it not only affects the flexibility of the labor market, but also indicates how knowledge spreads among firms. Hence, changes in the migration behavior of the inventors may have serious consequences for the economy's well-being, which makes this study particularly important. Currently, little is known about the internal mobility of highly skilled workers in the U.S. Thus, the objective of this study is to reveal the migration trend of the inventors and shed more light on the economic- and legal-related factors that may influence it in the long-term. The main findings of this paper confirm that, indeed, the trend of internal migration of inventors in the U.S. is declining in consonance with the overall internal migration trends. The probability of inventors deciding to migrate has decreased consistently over time, for any type of migration (across states, regions, cities, and companies). This paper discusses the possible factor(s) which gradually affected the internal migration in the U.S. over time. Moreover, this study points out the additional hypotheses in relation to the cause of the downward trends in migration that ought to be tested in order to better understand what happens with mobility in the American society, particularly among inventors.