Benefiting colleagues but not the city: Localized effects from the relocation of superstar inventors

Abstract

In this paper I examine episodes in which superstar inventors relocate to a new city. In particular, in order to assess whether the beneficial effects of physical proximity to a superstar have a restricted network dimension or a wider spatial breadth (spillovers), I estimate changes in patterns of patenting activity following these events for two different groups of inventors: the superstar's close collaborators, and all the other inventors in a given urban area, for both the locality where the superstar moves to and for the one that is left behind. In the case of collaborators, I restrict the attention to patents realized independently from the superstar. The results from the event study register a large and persistent positive effect on the collaborators in the city of destination, as well as a simultaneous negative trend affecting those still residing in the previous location. In the long run, these effects translate into an increased difference between the two groups of about 0.16 patents per inventor. Conversely, no city-wide spillover effect can be attested, offering little support to place-based policies aimed at inducing a positive influx of top innovators in urban areas. JEL Classification Codes: J61, O31, O33, R11

Air Pollution and Innovation

“…* p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01 be that inventors alternate between office and residence addresses for the patents they had filed. This issue is described in detail by Zacchia (2018) using the same dataset to trace the relocation of inventors. We follow his procedure to clean the data for unreasonable relocation patterns by assigning inventors to NUTS-3 regions in the following way:…”

Relocation as a Driver of Innovative Activity: A Global Study of Unicorn Founders’ Migration

“…According to certain estimates, immigrant inventors' contribution to patent activity is higher than that of natives (Kerr, Kerr, 2020b). The most active innovators (with more than 200 registered patents to their credit) emigrate five times more often than their less productive colleagues, thus positively affecting innovation activity in their places of relocation (Akcigit et al, 2016;Zacchia, 2018). One of the most mobile talent pools turns out to be Nobel Prize winners: a third of them work outside their country of origin (Kerr, 2020).…”

The Effects of Terrorist Attacks on Inventor Productivity and Mobility

“…Existing work shows that after the departure of a "superstar" inventor, collaborators suffer a productivity decline (Zacchia, 2018). As a result, we need to be cautious in interpreting any differences across the productivity of inventors who move and those who do not because any distinction could be due to inventors' individual characteristics or due to economic issues confronting the firms in which they work.…”