Spreading the Word: Geography, Policy, and Knowledge Spillovers

Sharon Belenzon and Mark Schankerman
Additional contact information
Sharon Belenzon: Fuqua School of Business, Duke University
Mark Schankerman: London School of Economics and CEPR

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2013, vol. 95, issue 3, 884-903

Abstract: Using new data on citations to university patents and scientific publications, we study how geography affects university knowledge spillovers. Citations to patents decline sharply with distance and are strongly constrained by state borders. The effect of distance on citations to scientific publications is less sharp, and the state border effect on publications is significant only for lower-quality public universities. We show that the state border effect is heterogeneous and strongly influenced by university and state characteristics and policies. It is larger for universities that are public and that have strong local development policies, and in states with strong noncompete labor laws, greater reliance on in-state educated scientists, and lower rates of interstate scientific labor mobility. We confirm the impact of noncompete statutes by studying a policy reform in Michigan. © 2013 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: knowledge spillovers; diffusion; geography; university technology transfer; patents; scienti c publications (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K41 L24 O31 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (154)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00334 link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:tpr:restat:v:95:y:2013:i:3:p:884-903

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().