The mover's advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists

•We use newly-collected data on individual migration of 14,299 research-active scientists.•Observations represent scientists in 16 countries and 4 fields of science.•We model performance as depending on migrant v. domestic status of the scientist.•We instrument migration for work or study by migration in childhood.•We find robust evidence that migration boosts scientific performance.

Migrant scientists outperform domestic scientists. The result persists after instrumenting migration for reasons of work or study with migration in childhood to minimize the effect of selection. The results are consistent with theories of knowledge recombination and specialty matching.