Working Paper: NBER ID: w16683
Authors: Pierre Azoulay; Joshua S. Graff Zivin; Bhaven N. Sampat
Abstract: Are scientific knowledge flows embodied in individuals, or "in the air"? To answer this question, we measure the effect of labor mobility in a sample of 9,483 elite academic life scientists on the citation trajectories associated with individual articles (resp. patents) published (resp. granted) before the scientist moved to a new institution. We find that article-to-article citations from the scientific community at the superstar's origin location are barely affected by their departure. In contrast, article-to-patent citations, and especially patent-to-patent citations, decline at the origin location following a star's departure, suggesting that spillovers from academia to industry are not completely disembodied. We also find that article-to-article citations at the superstar's destination location markedly increase after they move. Our results suggest that, to be realized, knowledge flows to industry may require more face-to-face interaction than those to academics. Moreover, to the extent that academic scientists do not internalize the effect of their location decisions on the circulation of ideas, our results raise the intriguing possibility that barriers to labor mobility in academic science limit the recombination of individual bits of knowledge, resulting in a suboptimal rate of scientific exploration.
Keywords: knowledge diffusion; labor mobility; scientific research; patents; citations
JEL Codes: O33
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| labor mobility (J62) | citation dynamics (article-to-article) (A14) |
| labor mobility (J62) | citation dynamics (article-to-patent) (O34) |
| labor mobility (J62) | citation dynamics (patent-to-patent) (O34) |
| labor mobility (J62) | citation dynamics (destination location) (R23) |
| physical proximity (R32) | knowledge transfer (O36) |
| barriers to labor mobility (J61) | scientific exploration (C90) |