mathematics and use a unique institutional feature of this discipline: the International Mathematics Olympiads (IMO), a prominent worldwide competition for high-school students. This setting allows us to measure talent in teenage years (as proxied by IMO scores) as well as to conduct direct comparisons of talent in teenage years across countries. Thus, in the paper we use the word talent to refer to an individual’s problem-solving capacity in their teenage years. This could be a product of innate ability, practice, or both. By connecting multiple sources, we are able to
for the country the individual represented at the IMO. By controlling for IMO score fixed effects, we compare individuals who had the same level of problem-solving ability in their late teens, thus mitigating concerns about endogeneous selection into migration based on early indicators or talent. In the alternative specification, we replace the migrant indicator variable by indicator variables for migrant to the U.S., migrant to the U.K. and migrant to other countries. The regressions are estimated by Poisson (when cites is the dependent variable) or Ordinary
percent earn a bronze medal. ICM = International Congress of Mathematicians; IMO = International Mathematical Olympiad. Chart 2 IMO scores and math PhDs Source : Agarwal, Ruchir, and Patrick Gaule. “Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster?” American Economic Review: insights 2(4): 409–24. Note : The chart is based on 4,710 IMO participants. Income categories are based on the World Bankcountry classification. IMO = International Mathematical Olympiad. Our recent work (written jointly with Geoff Smith) makes it possible to