Due to the growth in international migration in recent decades, the workforce of firms in host countries has become considerably more diverse, both demographically and culturally. It is an important question for firms and for governments to ask whether there are some productivity-enhancing...

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 up to about 150 miles and are strongly constrained by state borders. Distance also constrains...

Innovation processes within corporations increasingly tap into international technology sources, yet little is known about the relative contribution of different types of innovation channels. We investigate the effectiveness of different types of international technology sourcing activities...

This paper investigates how physical, organisational, institutional, cognitive, social, and ethnic proximities between inventors shape their collaboration decisions. Using a new panel of UK inventors and a novel identification strategy, this paper systematically explores the net effects of all...

Knowledge triggers regional growth. Evidence suggests that skilled labour force concentrates in islands of innovation, determining an advantage for innovative regions and a challenge for lagging ones. We address the role of knowledge in shaping effective markets for skilled labour. Estimates are...

We establish that domestically owned firms in two alternative models of emerging market economies, the Czech Republic and Russia, have not been converging to the technological frontier set by foreign owned firms. In both countries, the distance of domestic firms to the frontier grew (in all...

We examine the "home bias" of international knowledge spillovers as measured by the speed of patent citations (i.e. knowledge spreads slowly over international boundaries). We present the first compelling econometric evidence that the geographical localization of knowledge spillovers has fallen...

The importance of knowledge spillovers for achieving innovation and economic growth is widely recognized. It is not straightforward which type of spillovers is most effective: intra-sectoral spillovers or inter-sectoral spillovers. We investigate this controversy using a model of regional...

We design a conceptual framework for linking two approaches: the literature on absorptive capacity and the literature on spatial knowledge spillovers. Regions produce new knowledge, but only part of it is efficiently adopted in the economy; the share of efficiently adopted technology depends on...

Using comprehensive data for German establishments (1999-2008), we estimate plant-level production functions to analyze if “cultural diversity” affects total factor productivity. We distinguish diversity in the establishment's workforce and in the aggregate regional labor force where the...