Mobility of knowledge and local innovation activity

This paper studies the diffusion of knowledge and its consequences for local innovation production. In a common framework, we analyze the geographic reach of different channels of knowledge flows that thus far have been studied separately in the literature. To jointly estimate these flows, we develop and apply novel econometric techniques appropriate to the nature of the data. We find that geographic along with technological proximity to be more essential to the operation of market than to non-market channels of knowledge flows. External accessible disembodied knowledge has a strong positive effect on local innovation production that is larger than that of embodied knowledge.