Scientists on the move: tracing scientists’ mobility and its spatial distribution

This paper aims to provide new insights into the well-studied phenomenon of knowledge spillovers. We study one of the main mechanisms through which these spillovers occur, that is, the mobility of highly-skilled individuals. In contrast to earlier studies, we focus on the geographical mobility of inventors across European regions. First, we gather information from PCT patent documents (from the OECD REGPAT database, May 2008 edition) and match the names which seemed to belong to the same inventor using name matching algorithms; second, we create a new algorithm to decide whether each patent applied for under each name belongs to the same inventor, according to set of predetermined characteristics. We use this information to trace the pattern of scientists’ and inventors’ mobility across European regions.