Using patent citations as a proxy for the influence of foreign technology on French firms' patents, this paper finds that the inventions of importers are significantly more likely to be influenced by foreign technology than are the inventions of firms that do not import. Furthermore, importers' citations increase relative to similar firms after they start importing. Exporting, in contrast, is not significantly associated with citations to foreign patents. These results persist after controlling for foreign ownership linkages and joint ventures and alliances, and after correcting for selection bias using propensity-score matching.

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.