It is well known that patent citations occur disproportionately between patents issued to inventors living in the same location, which has been taken as evidence of geographically localized knowledge spillovers. In this study, we find that patent citations also occur disproportionately often in...

We examine the role of social relationships in facilitating knowledge flows by estimating the flow premium captured by a mobile inventor's previous location. Once an inventor has moved, they are gone - but are they forgotten? We find that knowledge flows to an inventor's prior location are...

Innovation is often predicated on discovering useful new combinations of existing knowledge in highly complex knowledge spaces. These needle-in-a-haystack type problems are pervasive in fields like genomics, drug discovery, materials science, and particle physics. We develop a...