Over the past two decades there has been a substantial increase in the mobility of students in Europe, while also research has become much more internationally oriented. In this paper we document changes in the structure of research and higher education in Europe and investigate potential...

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...

Commercializing knowledge involves transfer from discovering scientists to those who will develop it commercially. New codes and formulae describing discoveries develop slowly - with little incentive if value is low and many competing opportunities if high. Hence new knowledge remains naturally...

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...

This paper directs attention at the globalization of knowledge and knowledge creation as the fundamental global driver of economic outcomes in today's information economy. It documents the globalization of knowledge and spread of scientific research from advanced to developing countries and...

We review a recent body of theoretical literature that links the creation and diffusion of knowledge and technology to openness. We analyze two channels through which the spread of new ideas occurs: international trade and the activity of multinational firms (multinational production). The...

This paper presents and tests a new model of multinational firms to explain a rich array of multinational behavior. In contrast to most approaches, here the multinational faces costs to transferring its know-how that are increasing in technological complexity. Costly technology transfer gives...