International business travel: an engine of innovation?

By N. Hovhannisyan, Wolfgang Keller. Journal of economic growth (Boston), 2014

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While it is well known that managers prefer in-person meetings for negotiating deals and selling their products, face-to-face communication may be particularly important for the transfer of technology because technology is best explained and demonstrated in person. This paper studies the role of short-term cross-border labor movements for innovation by estimating the recent impact of U.S. business travel to foreign countries on their patenting rates. Business travel is shown to have a significant effect up and beyond technology transfer through international trade and foreign direct investment. On average, a 10 % increase in business travel leads to an increase in patenting by about 0.2 %, and inward business travel is about one fourth as potent for innovation as domestic R&D spending. We show that the technological knowledge of each business traveler matters by estimating a higher impact for travelers that originate in U.S. states with substantial innovation, such as California. This study provides initial evidence that international air travel may be an important channel through which cross-country income differences can be reduced.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e230c3ed317fb905ba5478f84e057857bdb040a0

Citations in the corpus

• High-Skilled Migration and Agglomeration (2017, unknown): “First, the circular flow of talent over short and long durations is increasingly emphasized as “brain circulation” (e.g., Saxenian 2006, Nanda and Khanna 2010, Hovhannisyan and Keller 2015).”
• Global Collaborative Patents (2018, unknown): “Singh (2005), Obukhova (2009), Choudhury (2015) and Hovhannisyan and Keller (2015) study related forms of international labour mobility and technology diffusion.”