How Do Travel Costs Shape Collaboration?

Christian Catalini, Christian Fons-Rosen and Patrick Gaulé

No 24780, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We develop a simple theoretical framework for thinking about how geographic frictions, and in particular travel costs, shape scientists' collaboration decisions and the types of projects that are developed locally versus over distance. We then take advantage of a quasi-experiment — the introduction of new routes by a low-cost airline — to test the predictions of the theory. Results show that travel costs constitute an important friction to collaboration: after a low-cost airline enters, the number of collaborations increases between 0.3 and 1.1 times, a result that is robust to multiple falsification tests and causal in nature. The reduction in geographic frictions is particularly beneficial for high quality scientists that are otherwise embedded in worse local environments. Consistent with the theory, lower travel costs also endogenously change the types of projects scientists engage in at different levels of distance. After the shock, we observe an increase in higher quality and novel projects, as well as projects that take advantage of complementary knowledge and skills between sub-fields, and that rely on specialized equipment. We test the generalizability of our findings from chemistry to a broader dataset of scientific publications, and to a different field where specialized equipment is less likely to be relevant, mathematics. Last, we discuss implications for the formation of collaborative R&D teams over distance.

JEL-codes: L93 O18 O3 O31 O33 R4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-ino, nep-ppm, nep-sog, nep-tre and nep-ure
Note: PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Christian Catalini & Christian Fons-Rosen & Patrick Gaulé, 2020. "How Do Travel Costs Shape Collaboration?," Management Science, vol 66(8), pages 3340-3360.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24780.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How Do Travel Costs Shape Collaboration? (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24780

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24780

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().