Can the Brain Drain of Elite Scientists be Reversed? Evidence from China’s Young Thousand Talents Program

An increasing number of countries are setting up policy programs to attract talented expats to return. Can such programs help reverse the brain drain of elite scientists from developing countries to the developed world? Will they facilitate or hinder returnee scientists’ knowledge productivity? What factors may explain the observed performance gap (if any) between returnees and their overseas peers? Answers to these questions have important implications regarding the mobility of elite scientists across national borders, the geographic distribution of STEM knowledge production, and the relative merits of different science funding schemes around the world. We study one of the most aggressive talent programs in the world, China’s Young Thousand Talents (YTT) program, and estimate its impact on returnee scientists’ research productivity. We use a selection-on-observables approach where each YTT scientist is matched with comparable control scientists of similar education backgrounds and early-career knowledge productivity but having stayed in overseas academic institutions. Difference-in-differences (DID) estimation shows that YTT scientists, compared to their overseas peers, are more productive across almost all tiers of journals. Furthermore, this productivity gain mainly takes place in last-authored publications and can be explained by the YTT scientists’ access to larger funding and research teams. The main driver for scientists to stay in academia is to pursue independent research, but it has become challenging for early-stage scientists to access research funding in the US and EU. As a result, talent programs such as China’s YTT may not only expedite expatriates’ return decisions but also motivate local, young scientists to seek international research opportunities