Online “Brain Gain”: Immigrants Return Knowledge Home

This paper documents the effect of immigration on dissemination of online knowledge. In particular, I focus on online knowledge describing destination countries in the native languages of immigrants. To quantify online knowledge, I focus on the world’s most popular online knowledge platform, Wikipedia. An increase in immigration yields more knowledge contributed to Wikipedia about destination countries in the languages spoken in the origin countries of immigrants. This result is confirmed by regressions that instrument immigration following the supply-push approach. The mechanism underlying a higher level of knowledge contribution due to immigration is an increase in participation on Wikipedia of anonymous contributors, who, according to the Wikipedia community, are rather occasional contributors. An increase in immigration inflow by about 1000 persons yields an increase in the amount of content added to Wikipedia anonymously by 1% about scientists and 3% about cuisine. These effects are driven by longer content contributions.