Soviet-trained scientists carried a finite, distinctive stock of expertise that earned a career premium until publication diffused it away

The central mechanism of Pronskikh's Selling the Stock, Not the Cream is that the 1990s émigré career premium was a rent on a depletable stock of knowledge, not a durable return on talent. Former-Soviet scientists arrived holding "a finite, distinctive stock of Soviet expertise" — techniques, results, and traditions that had developed in relative isolation and were not yet part of global science. That distinctiveness "commanded a career premium." But the premium was self-liquidating: "their depletion — as exported knowledge was published and absorbed into global science — removed the demand on which the other factors depended."

The title's metaphor is deliberate — selling the stock, not the cream. The advantage lay in transferring a body of accumulated knowledge (the stock), and once that knowledge was published and absorbed into the international literature, the scarcity that priced it vanished. Later arrivals faced a market in which their distinctive stock had already been diffused by earlier arrivals, so the same expertise no longer earned the same rent. This is the market-structure explanation underlying claim-soviet-emigre-career-premium-was-structural-not-ability: the "structure of the receiving market" that changed over the decade is, concretely, the progressive exhaustion of demand for a fixed stock of knowledge.

Because the claim rests on a single un-refereed preprint stating its own mechanism, it is held at seedling; corroboration is tracked in question-soviet-emigre-career-premium-corroboration.