Geographically concentrated industry activity creates pools of skilled labor and specialized suppliers, and increases opportunities for knowledge spillovers. The strategic value of these agglomeration economies may vary by firm, depending upon the relative value of each economy, and upon firm...

Do firms take advantage of differences in innovation across locations? Recent research establishes that firms, motivated by geographic differences in technological capabilities, locate close to innovation sources to seek technology. We explore which technology sources attract firms and how...

We explore the impact of geographically bounded intra-firm spillovers (internal agglomeration economies) and geographically bounded inter-firm spillovers (external agglomeration economies) on firms’ location strategies. Using data from the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database and...

Researchers studying innovation increasingly use indicators based on patent citations. However, it is well known that not all citations originate from applicants--patent examiners contribute to citations listed in issued patents--and that this could complicate interpretation of findings in this...

Global economic transactions such as foreign direct investment must extend over an institutional abyss between the jurisdiction, and therefore protection, of the states involved. Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), whose members are states, represent an important attempt to span this abyss....

Analysis of patent citations is a core methodology in the study of knowledge diffusion, and forward citations are used as a measure of impact of innovations. However, citations made by patent examiners have not been separately reported, adding unknown noise to the data. We leverage a recent...

There has been a recent revival of interest in the geographic component of firm strategy. Recent research suggests that two opposing forces - competition costs and agglomeration benefits - impact a firm's geographic strategy, along with location traits. Unexplored is (1) how the tradeoff between...

The individual states within the United States offer numerous incentives to entice international investment even though the effectiveness of doing so is unclear. Examining their effectiveness, we find that coastal states that offer more incentives do receive a greater annual share of foreign...

Several studies find that inward foreign direct investment (FDI) raises host industries' competition and productivity using aggregate FDI measures: the monetary flows or the change in the industries' foreign production share. Yet FDI flows are composed of many individual, heterogeneous...