Three Essays on the Mobility of Human Capital and Knowledge Transfer

Both economics and strategic management literature illuminate the impacts of human capital and knowledge on the growth of regional economies and firms. Despite their different characteristics as factors of production, human capital and knowledge often move (or stay) together, as knowledge is embedded in the human brain. Also, human capital and knowledge have shared characteristics; a region or firm cannot be free from the risk of unintended leakage because human capital can move deliberately and knowledge can spill over through various channels. Therefore, it is in the best interests of firms and regions to foster (or retain) human capital and knowledge. The three papers constituting this thesis all address what affects mobility decision of human capital across regions or firms, address what are the antecedents of firms and regions attracting (or poaching) human capital, and also address how knowledge transfer is affected by such human capital mobility

Benefiting Colleagues but not the City: Localized Effects from the Relocation of Superstar Inventors

In this paper I examine episodes in which superstar inventors relocate to a new city. In particular, in order to assess whether the beneficial effects of physical proximity to a superstar have a restricted network dimension or a wider spatial breadth (spillovers), I estimate changes in patterns of patenting activity following these events for two different groups of inventors: the superstar’s close collaborators, and all the other inventors in a given urban area, for both the locality where the superstar moves to and for the one that is left behind. In the case of collaborators, I restrict the attention to patents realized independently from the superstar. The results from the event study register a large and persistent positive effect on the collaborators in the city of destination, as well as a simultaneous negative trend affecting those still residing in the previous location. In the long run, these effects translate into an increased difference between the two groups of about 0.16 patents per inventor. Conversely, no city-wide spillover effect can be attested, offering little support to place-based policies aimed at inducing a positive influx of top innovators in urban areas

Air pollution and innovation

Existing estimates of the economic costs of air pollution do not account for its effect on inventive output. Using two weather phenomena as instruments, we estimate this effect in a sample of 1,288 European regions. A decrease in exposure to small particulate matter of 0.17µg/m3 - the average yearly reduction in Europe - leads to 1.7% more patented inventions. After ruling out reallocation of human capital, inventor mortality and R&D expenditures as drivers of the effect, we conclude that air pollution's harm to economic output increases by at least 10% when accounting for innovation

Mind the Gap: Advancing Evolutionary Approaches to Regional Development with Progressive Empirical Strategies

Explaining the persistently uneven spatial patterns of development remains a central goal of economic geography and regional science. Recognizing that regional development is a process of ongoing change, many scholars now approach the topic from an evolutionary perspective that identifies knowledge recombination processes and institutions as key drivers of change. However, research has not yet fully integrated the various theoretical perspectives and empirical data streams that characterize evolutionary approaches. The present contribution identifies how an evolutionary approach centered on knowledge and institutions can be integrated with complementary forms of evidence gathered from a variety of sources to advance our understanding of regional development. Expanding and integrating the evidence base used to study regional change has important implications for making effective and responsive policy instruments.European Commission Horizon 2020European Research CouncilScience Foundation Irelan

Disclosure and subsequent innovation: evidence from the patent depository library program

How important is access to patent documents for subsequent innovation? We examine the expansion of the USPTO Patent Library system after 1975. Patent libraries provided access to patents before the Internet. We find that after patent library opening, local patenting increases by 8–20 percent relative to similar regions. Additional analyses suggest that disclosure of technical information drives this effect: inventors increasingly take up ideas from outside their region, and the effect is strongest in technologies where patents are more informative. We thus provide evidence that disclosure plays an important role in cumulative innovation.SES-1564368 and SES-1564381 - National Science FoundationPublished versio

MapAffil: A bibliographic tool for mapping author affiliation strings to cities and their geocodes worldwide

Bibliographic records often contain author affiliations as free-form text strings. Ideally one would be able to automatically identify all affiliations referring to any particular country or city such as Saint Petersburg, Russia. That introduces several major linguistic challenges. For example, Saint Petersburg is ambiguous (it refers to multiple cities worldwide and can be part of a street address) and it has spelling variants (e.g., St. Petersburg, Sankt-Peterburg, and Leningrad, USSR). We have designed an algorithm that attempts to solve these types of problems. Key components of the algorithm include a set of 24k extracted city, state, and country names (and their variants plus geocodes) for candidate look-up, and a set of 1.1M extracted word n-grams, each pointing to a unique country (or a US state) for disambiguation. When applied to a collection of 12.7M affiliation strings listed in PubMed, ambiguity remained unresolved for only 0.1%. For the 4.2M mappings to the USA, 97.7% were complete (included a city), 1.8% included a state but not a city, and 0.4% did not include a state. A random sample of 300 manually inspected cases yielded six incompletes, none incorrect, and one unresolved ambiguity. The remaining 293 (97.7%) cases were unambiguously mapped to the correct cities, better than all of the existing tools tested: GoPubMed got 279 (93.0%) and GeoMaker got 274 (91.3%) while MediaMeter CLIFF and Google Maps did worse. In summary, we find that incorrect assignments and unresolved ambiguities are rare (< 1%). The incompleteness rate is about 2%, mostly due to a lack of information, e.g. the affiliation simply says “University of Illinois” which can refer to one of five different campuses. A search interface called MapAffil is available from http://abel.lis.illinois.edu/; the full PubMed affiliation dataset and batch processing is available upon request. The longitude and latitude of the geographical city-center is displayed when a city is identified. This not only helps improve geographic information retrieval but also enables global bibliometric studies of proximity, mobility, and other geo-linked data.NIH P01AG039347; NSF 1348742Ope

Post-disaster fluctuations in innovation: evidence from Hurricane Katrina

Theoretically motivated by evidence that large exogenous shocks can produce enduring fluctuations in economic behavior, this study shows that counties affected by Hurricane Katrina exhibit substantial post-disaster increases in the quantity and quality of patenting compared to unaffected counterfactual counties. The significance of the matched-sample difference-in-differences estimates rises in damage severity, persists up to 10 years, and is robust to factors such as a post-disaster economic rebound, changes in the demand for specific innovation, aid and investment, wealth, education, and traditional explanations of innovative activity, such as firm R&D, institutions and market factors, but enhanced by inventor density and collaboration. Using georeferenced histories of inventors, the analyses trace the “Katrina effect” and control for selective migration and company affiliation. The findings point to an understudied driver of the geography of innovation.First author draf