Essays on Innovation Economics

Countries across the world attempt to increase the wellbeing of their populations by fostering economic growth. Innovation, as one of the boosters of regional development, has thus received growing attention from policymakers. This dissertation focuses on one of the key drivers of innovation, namely access to information. Chapters 1 and 2 look at active knowledge absorption; passive, non-scientific knowledge absorption is addressed in chapter 3.

Chapter 1 investigates the effect of reducing the cost of access to knowledge on local inventive activity. Exploiting the introduction of BITNET, an early version of the Internet, we show that university patenting increased after the adoption of BITNET at the expense of patent quality. Further results show that BITNET seems to have facilitated the translation of scientific insights to innovation by inducing new, productive collaborations.

Chapter 2 examines the role of knowledge embodied in people. A new dataset has been created that captures the movement of scientists during the German reunification process. This data is used to study whether domestic scientists transition more successfully when they are also surrounded by peers other than their domestically trained colleagues.

Chapter 3 turns to passive knowledge absorption via television. We exploit differential access to West German TV programs by East German inventors, and attempt to understand whether TV access impacts inventive activity, and if so, how the direction and intensity of innovation is influenced.