DOES MOBILITY INCREASE THE PRODUCTIVITYOF INVENTORS? NEW EVIDENCE FROMA QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

Although labor mobility has been recognized as a key mechanism to transfer tacit knowledge,prior research on inventors has so far neglected to address the question of the consequence ofa move on inventive performance. This paper improves on the current R&D literature bypresenting a quasi-experimental approach to explore the effect of a specific move of aninventor on his performance. The quasi-experiment provides a favorable setting to test thisrelationship since it allows interpreting changes of inventive performance causal to aparticular move.[...]