Knowledge Spillovers Effects : A Patent Inventors Approach

In this paper we investigate the effects of technological and geographical proximity on the knowledge flows in three economic areas: USA, Japan and Europe. In each economic area, we exploit information from two international patent offices data, the United States Patent and Trademarks Office data and the European Patent Office data. In this way, we can investigate the effect of the proximities on knowledge spillovers for 240 international firms. In particular, the main contribution to the existing literature is that we introduce a patent inventors approach to measure the proximity between the firms. Generally, patents are attributed to the economic area where firms are located. Now, patents are allocated on the basis of their inventors’ distribution. Furthermore, we use an international sample so that we can compare the empirical results among different economic markets and, finally, we explore the robustness of the technological and geographical proximity effects and the extent to which it may be affected by patent system features. The empirical results indicate that there is a statistically positive impact of technological and geographical proximity on knowledge spillovers and that these results are robust with respect to patent office data used in the analysis