The development of academic research capacities carries within itself the seeds of future economic and social development in the form of human capital, tacit knowledge and intellectual property. Channelling knowledge flows into new sources of technological innovation has become an academic task,...

We develop a new dataset using UNESCO source materials on the location of nearly 15,000 universities in about 1,500 regions across 78 countries, some dating back to the 11th Century. We estimate fixed effects models at the sub-national level between 1950 and 2010 and find that increases in the...