A growing body of research is demonstrating a robust positive relationship between the diversity of a city’s foreign-born population in the USA and worker productivity. Other research has focused on diversity within firms, similarly finding positive effects in many cases. Although it appears that diverse teams within firms are better at problem-solving and are more creative, the exact mechanism(s) that drive the relationship between diversity and productivity at the scale of city-regions are less apparent and underexplored in extant research. Drawing on research from several fields, I describe four mechanisms that might drive the relationship between immigrant diversity and productivity at the urban level. I explore each mechanism with a pseudo panel of workers and fixed effects OLS regressions across U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas between 2011 and 2017. The results most strongly support that at the urban level, diversity enhances productivity through what I call ‘exposure effects’ and ‘interactive problem-solving’, wherein workers become more productive and more creative through exposure to new cultures and ways of thinking and through joint problem-solving. These results suggest that positive externalities arise when coupling rising immigrant diversity with the social integration of people from diverse backgrounds.

中文翻译：

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移民多样性、融合和工人生产力：揭示“多样性溢出”效应背后的机制

越来越多的研究表明，一个城市在美国的外国出生人口的多样性与工人生产力之间存在强大的正相关关系。其他研究侧重于公司内部的多样性，在许多情况下同样发现了积极影响。尽管公司内部的多元化团队似乎更擅长解决问题并且更具创造性，但在现有研究中，推动多样性与生产力之间关系的确切机制并不那么明显，也未被充分探索。借助来自多个领域的研究，我描述了可能推动移民多样性与城市层面生产力之间关系的四种机制。我用一个伪工人小组和美国的固定效应 OLS 回归来探索每种机制 2011 年至 2017 年的大都市统计区。结果最有力地支持，在城市层面，多样性通过我所说的“暴露效应”和“交互式问题解决”提高了生产力，其中工人通过接触新事物变得更有生产力和更有创造力文化和思维方式以及通过共同解决问题。这些结果表明，当将不断增加的移民多样性与来自不同背景的人的社会融合相结合时，就会产生积极的外部性。