How Tall Are the Paper Walls? Barriers to International Mobility and Technology Diusion

International mobility promotes technology diusion across countries; on the other hand, barriers to international mobility can hinder the process of technology diusion. This paper uses bilateral visa restrictions data from 30 host and 161 home countries for 2001-2012 to show that the global technology gap increases as the barriers to international mobility increase. These results are robust across dyadic and cross-sectional data as well as OLS and 2SLS estimation methods. The results suggest that visa facilitation programs by advanced countries could promote international technology diusion.