Replication Data for Chapter 4: NAVIGATING THE KNOWLEDGE BOUNDARIES: THE IMPACT OF COLLABORATING WITH FOREIGN-EDUCATED RESEARCHERS ON NON-MOBILE RESEARCHERS’ KNOWLEDGE EXPLORATION AND CREATION

Our first contribution is to provide evidence of how collaboration with foreign-educated researchers influences non-mobile researchers’ novelty exploration and production. To achieve this, we construct a novel dataset on researchers from Colombia. Our empirical strategy includes a difference-indifferences estimator to conduct an Event Study based on a matched sample of non-mobile researchers. We first find that collaborating with foreign-educated researchers reduces non-mobile researchers’ exploration of new topics (with respect to colleagues who do not have those interactions), defined by the share of papers with new topics and changes in research topics (i.e., pivot index). Specifically, collaboration decreases the share of papers with new topics by 18 percentage points (pp) and the pivot index by 11 pp. Second, using a measure that captures new combinations of scientific inter-community (Foster et al., 2015), we could not detect any effect on novelty at the global level for Colombian non-mobile researchers. We finally explore whether there are differences in the effects given the type of foreign-educated collaborator. Results indicate similar effects on novelty at the individual level when non-mobile researchers collaborate with diaspora and intermittent researchers or returnees.