Isolating Personal Knowledge Spillovers: Coinventor Deaths and Spatial Citation Differentials

Benjamin Balsmeier, Lee Fleming and Sonja Lück

American Economic Review: Insights, 2023, vol. 5, issue 1, 21-34

Abstract: We propose a new method to estimate and isolate the localization of knowledge spillovers due to the physical presence of a person, using after-application but pre-grant deaths of differently located coinventors of the same patent. The approach estimates the differences in local citations between the deceased and still-living inventors at increasingly distant radii. Patents receive 26 percent fewer citations from within a radius of 20 miles around the deceased, relative to still-living coinventors. Differences attenuate with time and distance, are stronger when still-living coinventors live farther from the deceased, and hold for a subsample of possibly premature deaths.

JEL-codes: O31 O33 O34 R32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1257/aeri.20210275

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