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‘Job hopping’ by engineers and scientists is widely heralded as an important channel for knowledge spillovers within industries. Far less is known, however, about the actions firms take to reduce the outward flow of knowledge through markets for skilled labor. This study investigates the efficacy of a lever that has received little research attention: corporate reputations for toughness in patent enforcement. Drawing on unique data on enforcement activity, intra-industry inventor mobility, and patent citations in the U.S. semiconductor industry, we find that a firm's litigiousness significantly reduces spillovers otherwise anticipated from departures of employee inventors, particularly when the hiring organizations are entrepreneurial ventures. Surprisingly, the deterrent effects of patent enforcement are similar in magnitude for firms located in California, a state characterized by open norms for knowledge trading, and firms headquartered in other U.S. states. The study sheds new light on the strategic actions firms use to prevent rivals from capturing value from their investments in human capital and research and development. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of new industries demands access to local capabilities. Little attention has yet been paid to the role of spillovers from neighbour regions for industrial diversification, nor has the role of network linkages between neighbour regions been investigated. As the spread of capabilities has a strong geographical bias, we expect regions to develop new industries in which their neighbour regions are specialized. To test this hypothesis, we analyse the development of new industries in US states during the period 2000-2012. We show that a US state has a higher probability of developing a comparative advantage in a new industry if a neighbour state is specialized in that industry. We also show that neighbour US states have more similar export structures. This export similarity seems to be explained by higher social connectivity between neighbour states, as embodied in their bilateral migration patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at contributing to the research on knowledge spillovers and their spatial extent by presenting new empirical evidence on a key mechanism driving and directing knowledge diffusion processes, namely, the mobility of knowledge and highly-skilled workers. The analysis is based on a rich data set on US inventors and their patents filed at the European Patent Office from 1978 to 2004. Findings indicate that two distinctive spatial patterns can be detected: inventors move both at short and large spatial distances (i.e., three hours and more than 8 hours driving distance, respectively) in similar proportions. Interestingly, in the largest innovative urban areas inventors' inflows and outflows primarily involve distant rather than neighbour areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper expands the organization theory and evidence on regional industrial agglomerations. We define regional economic activities according to the attributes of the organizations that populate a region and investigate how organizational characteristics influence macro-outcomes at a regional economic level. We focus on two dimensions emerging from two widely known organizational forms: the managerial corporation and the knowledge cluster with a marked orientation toward interfirm knowledge spillovers. We use an original data set of 146 U.S. cities to obtain variations in the extent to which they are populated by managerial firms or knowledge clusters. By utilizing city-level measures of managerial salaries, we test how the intensity of managerial corporation versus knowledge cluster characteristics affects the mean and dispersion of the "rewards" of cities. Our evidence suggests that higher managerial corporate characteristics lower the variability of rewards, while they have no effect on the mean of rewards. Higher-knowledge cluster characteristics produce both higher dispersion and higher expected rewards. We explain these results by looking at the different learning mechanisms of the two organizational types. In so doing, we highlight the role of intra- and interfirm knowledge processes as important sources of differences in the rewards of the two models. From an empirical point of view, results are confirmed using both patent-based and skill mobility-based measures of knowledge spillovers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]