Im Mittelpunkt der gegenwärtigen ökonomischen Entwicklung steht verstärkt Wissen als fundamentale Ressource und Triebkraft wirtschaftlichen Wachstums sowie Lernen als der bedeutendste Prozess. Diese Sichtweise wird durch das theoretische Konstrukt der Learning Economy beschrieben. Die...

An inventor's own knowledge is a key input in the innovation process. This knowledge can be built by interacting with and learning from others. This paper uses a new large-scale panel dataset on European inventors matched to their employers and patents. We document key empirical facts on...

What prevents the spread of information among coworkers, and which management practices facilitate workplace knowledge flows? We conducted a field experiment in a sales company, addressing these questions with three active treatments. (1) Encouraging workers to talk about their sales techniques...

How large are spatial barriers to transferring knowledge? We analyze the international operations of multinational firms to answer this fundamental question. In our model firms can transfer bits of knowledge to their foreign affiliates in either embodied (traded intermediates) or disembodied...

The rate of regional growth of new knowledge in the field of nanotechnology, as measured by counts of articles and patents in the open-access digital library NanoBank, is shown to be positively affected both by the size of existing regional stocks of recorded knowledge in all scientific fields,...

While the cumulative nature of knowledge is recognized as central to economic growth, the microeconomic foundations of cumulativeness are less understood. This paper investigates the impact of a research-enhancing institution on cumulativeness, highlighting two effects. First, a selection effect...

Research on intellectual property has focused on formal legally recorded rights that we call deeded, most often measured by granted patents. Meanwhile, other "defacto" IP (mainly purposive secrecy and natural excludability) has become more important because of the increasing closeness of...