KDI School of Public Policy and Management, Korea, Republic of
We examine the effect of cross-border visits on scientific collaboration by leveraging the implementation of the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP) across 41 countries, 1988-2023. The VWP facilitates easier travel for international researchers to the US for attending conferences, visiting US research institutions, and networking potential collaborators. The results from individual and country-level staggered difference-in-differences estimation show that even short-term visits significantly increased scientific collaboration between researchers in VWP-designated countries and those in the US. The effect varies across academic fields. We observe more pronounced effects in fields such as nursing, veterinary science, health professions, economics, and management, compared to smaller effects in chemistry, physics, biochemistry, and mathematics. Fields previously dominated by solo authors also exhibited a greater effect. Further, the impact on conference proceedings was both more immediate and larger than on journal publications. A series of Falsification analyses shows that the number of publications solely by a single author, authors from the same country, and non-US authors did not change. This supports that the VWP and an eased short-term visits to the US indeed drive the results. Our findings underscore the important role of short-term face-to-face interactions between researchers from different countries and provide implications for hosting in-person seminars and conferences, visa and immigration policies, research and development (R\&D) strategies, and the future of work.
