HOW IMPORTANT IS U.S. LOCATION FOR RESEARCH IN SCIENCE?

This paper asks whether being located outside the United States lowers research productivity in a data set of foreign-born, U.S.- educated scientists. Instrumenting location with visa status that requires return to home countries, we find a large negative relationship between non-U.S. location and research output for countries with low income per capita but none for countries with high income per capita. This suggests that a scientist exogenously located in a country at the top of the income distribution can expect to be as productive in research as he or she would be in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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