Are lone inventors more or less likely to invent breakthroughs' Recent research has attempted to resolve this question by considering the variance of creative outcome distributions. It has implicitly assumed a symmetric thickening or thinning of both tails, that a greater probability of...

We explore the impact of geographic dispersion of a firm's R&D activities on the quality of its innovative output. Using data on over half a million patents from 1,127 firms, we find that having geographically distributed R&D per se does not improve the quality of a firm's innovations. In fact,...