Kellogg Fellow Doran Receives Alfred P. Sloan Grant
ELIZABETH RANKIN • DATE: JANUARY 17, 2011
Faculty Fellow Kirk Doran has received a $295,876 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for “Immigration, Innovation, and Knowledge Creation.” Doran and George Borjas of Harvard University are principal investigators on the project, which seeks to understand how high-skill immigrants to the US affect knowledge creation, productivity, employment, and specialization in the mathematical sciences and related fields. Their empirical research focuses on the influx of eastern-block mathematicians into the US after the fall of Communism.
Doran, who also received funding from the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and the Kauffman Foundation, is based at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA for this academic year so he can focus exclusively on the project.
He expects it to generate several academic papers as well as a policy brief to be circulated widely to policy makers. “We want to help academics understand high-skill immigration better, but we also want to give policy makers the opportunity to base their decisions on facts, instead of popular wisdom or guesswork,” he says.
