Labor Mobility of Scientists, Technological Diffusion, and the Firm's Patenting Decision

We develop and test a model of the patenting and R&D decisions of an innovating firm whose researcher-employees sometime quit to join or start a rival. In our model, the innovating firm patents to protect itself from its workers. We show theoretically that the risk of a scientist's departure raises the firm's propensity to patent an innovation and reduces its research expenditures, which is confirmed in our empirical study of firm-level panel data. Our results suggest that the scientists' turnover partly explains cross-industry patenting variation, recent increases in patenting, and why small firms have high patent-R&D ratios.