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...

How do regions acquire the knowledge they need to diversify their economic activities? How does the migration of workers among firms and industries contribute to the diffusion of that knowledge? Here we measure the industry, occupation, and location specific knowledge carried by workers from one...

Partnering with the Census we implement a new survey of "structured" management practices in 32,000 US manufacturing plants. We find an enormous dispersion of management practices across plants, with 40% of this variation across plants within the same firm. This management variation accounts for...

The extensive literature on knowledge management spans several fields, but there are remarkably few studies that address the basic question as to whether knowledge management practices improve organizational performance. I examine that question using a national probability sample of...

In modern knowledge driven economies, firms are increasingly aware that individual and collective knowledge is a major factor of economic performance. The larger the firms and the stronger their connection with technology intensive industries, the more are they likely to set up knowledge...

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...