Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

As ethnic diversity in the workforce rises, it is becoming more important to understand its implications for productivity and the dispersion of ideas. I explore the impact of cross-ethnic collaborations among biomedical scientists on their research agenda. Using data on scientific publications and their authors, I identify scientific topics that are disproportionately heavily studied by the 13 most commonly represented ethnicities, and show that gaining coauthors of a different ethnicity induces a scientist to study topics associated with that ethnicity. In causal analysis, I focus attention on studying the impact of Chinese coauthorships, leveraging the rapid increase in Chinese student and high-skilled worker admissions into the United States in the 21st century. IV estimates imply that having one Chinese coauthor induces a scientist's research to become significantly more aligned with that of Chinese scientists, closing up to 23% of the difference in topics between the average non-Chinese and Chinese author.