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Spillovers in space: does geography matter?

Sergey Lychagin, Joris Pinkse, Margaret E. Slade and John Van Reenen


Using U.S. firm level panel data we simultaneously assess the contributions to productivity of three potential sources of research and development spillovers: geographic, technological, and product market ("horizontal"). To do so, we construct new measures of geographic proximity based on the distribution of a firm's inventor locations as well as its headquarters. We find that geographic location is important for productivity, as are technology (but not product) spillovers, and that both intra and inter-regional (counties) spillovers matter. The geographic location of a firm's researchers is more important than its headquarters. These benefits may be the reason why local policy makers compete so hard for the location of local R&D labs and high tech workers. ? 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and the Editorial Board of The Journal of Industrial Economics.


1 June 2016


The Journal of Industrial Economics 64(2) , pp.295-335, 2016


DOI: 10.1111/joie.12103

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joie.12103#

This Journal article is published under the centre's Growth programme.