The Contribution of Foreign Master's Students to US Start-Ups

 

This paper estimates the effect of increasing the share of foreign-born Master graduates on the creation of innovative start-ups in the US combining information on international students graduating from Master's programs by university cohort with data on start-ups created in the US between 1999 and 2020 by graduates of those cohorts. 

 For each additional ten percentage points of foreign students graduating in a Master's cohort, the authors find 0.4 additional start-ups in that cohort. Then, using a name-based attribution of the origin of creators of start-ups, thetfind that between 30 and 45% of the total start-up creation effect is attributable to a positive spillover of foreign-born on start-up founders of US origin.