Cournot seminar – Francesco Lissoni (U. de Bordeaux)

Event details :

We are pleased to welcome to the next session of the BETA Cournot seminar organised with the support of the FSEG on Friday 06/02 at 2:00pm:

Francesco Lissoni (U. de Bordeaux)

who will present his paper entitled

The Chosen: Researcher Visas and Foreign PhD Graduates’ Careers in France

Abstract: We investigate whether and how the introduction of the first visa scheme dedicated by France to foreign researchers (the carte de sejour “scientifique-chercheur” of 1998) affected the post-graduation stay rate of doctoral graduates of French universities from outside the European Union (EU), most of whom coming from former colonies in Arab-speaking countries and Western Africa. We build a novel dataset containing the scientific publications of all doctoral graduates in STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) from 1992 to 2002; and identify as stayers those with a post-PhD publishing activity and a French university affiliation (while leavers include both those with no postdoc academic record or active outside France).
Alternatively, we identify as stayers those who become themselves doctoral supervisors, by
2025. Through name analysis, we distinguish between non-EU graduates, to whom the carte
de sejour applied, and French or other EU ones, to whom it did not. Based on a difference-indifferences estimation strategy with repeated cross-sectional data, we find no meaningful impact of the policy under study. The results hold for various versions of our name analysis and our dependent variable. Stay rates eventually converge, but much later than both 1998 and with no apparent connection to visa policy.