Does Labour Mobility Foster Innovation? Evidence from Sweden

Pontus Braunerhjelm, Ding Ding () and Per Thulin ()
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Ding Ding: CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies, Royal Institute of Technology, Postal: CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies, Royal Institute of Technology, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden

No 403, Working Paper Series in Economics and Institutions of Innovation from Royal Institute of Technology, CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies

Abstract: By utilising a Swedish unique, matched employer-employee dataset that has been pooled with firm-level patent application data, we provide new evidence that knowledge workers’ mobility has a positive and strongly significant impact on firm innovation output, as measured by firm patent applications. The effect is particularly strong for knowledge workers that have previously worked in a patenting firm (the learning-by-hiring effect), but firms losing a knowledge worker are also shown to benefit (the diaspora effect), albeit more weakly. Finally, the effect is more pronounced when the joining worker originates in another region.

Keywords: Labour mobility; knowledge diffusion; innovation; social networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 O31 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2015-04-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-ino, nep-lma, nep-sbm, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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